Forwarding Mail - a cautionary tale...

Good info to pass along. Not applicable to me but still good to know.

When you fill out an official temporary Change of Address with the postal service, it should never get to your local post office as it is rerouted at a distribution center. I guess if your mail was coming from a local address using your same post office it would never get to the distribution center?

Same thing can happen with mail hold. Returned from a 2 week trip and found mail box stuffed with mail. We now ask a neighbor to check a couple of days after we leave on a trip.

Accsys - the key word in your post is "should". The folks at the PO are human and make mistakes - maybe more than they should..... Our neighbor gets ours when we are gone.

Our mail goes to our commercial remailing service now, but back when we used to have it forwarded by the USPS, the mail never got to the local post office. It was labeled and forwarded at the regional sorting center.

Unfortunately the USPS does not have a decent system for forwarding mail. It seems to be dependent on your local carrier checking and remembering.

When I started as a full timer, I had already set up my South Dakota mail service months in advance. I notified all the sources of mail I could think of. Then a week or so before selling the house and moving out, I set up mail forwarding with the local post office. The new home owners were slow in moving in so I checked the mail box at the house and sure enough it was full of our mail. I made another trip to the post office concerning the forwarding. We were set to begin traveling but unfortunately my wife had an accident and our trip was delayed several weeks. During that time we were camping at a relatives house. Weeks later and more trips to the post office, I was still finding our mail at the old house. Years later we found out that an important piece of mail had been lost. We found out when the IRS sent notice that we owed taxes due to a check for thousands of dollars that we never received.

I don't have anything good to say about the mail forwarding system for the USPS.

USPS is notoriously unreliable. We take our mailbox down when we are on the road so they can't leave mail.

We have our mail held about 6 times a year. Been doing this for twenty plus years and have never had a problem.

Our mail delivery person out here in the country is a gem. We are very lucky.

accsys wrote:
When you fill out an official temporary Change of Address with the postal service, it should never get to your local post office as it is rerouted at a distribution center. I guess if your mail was coming from a local address using your same post office it would never get to the distribution center?

That is what I thought and perhaps at one time it was the case, but now it is not. It makes more sense to me that mail would be forwarded at the point of origin, not the local PO, but when I talked to a rep at the USPS' main customer service center a couple years ago because we were not getting some mail forwarded, I was told that any mail that is forwarded is received by our local PO and then it is our carrier that handles the forwarding.

The first year we had our mail forwarded, we did not receive the one bill that we cannot receive paperless. The bill is sent to Girardo, Michael at my address. When I talked to the USPS' rep about not receiving that bill, I was told that I had to fill out a separate forwarding application for every combination of my name. I told her that I selected the Household option not Individual option when filling out the application so wouldn't that forward all my mail? She said it didn't matter, that the local carrier was looking for Girardo to be the second name listed when putting the forwarding sticker on. When they see Michael second, they send it back to the sender!? Crazy. Ironically, that same year, my wife received a piece of mail sent to her Maiden name. The carrier wrote Girardo on the envelope and it was forwarded to us!! The application I filled out had no mention of her maiden name. We have never received a water bill, mailed to Girardo, Michael, forwarded to us.

-Michael

Before you leave town, go to your local post office, and get a good telephone number that you can use to contact them directly.

The PO used to put the phone number for every post office on the internet, but they've quit doing that.

With a phone number, you can talk to people who know what's happening with your mail at your post office from where you happen to be.