<p>Here is a silly question I have wondered about for a long time. We sometimes receive mail for the previous owner of our home, who was foreclosed on. He had a lot of creditors after him, and even though he has not been here for at least 14 years, we occasionally still get notices. I used to call the collection agencies to inform them that the guy was no longer here, until one time the individual I talked to yelled that I wasn’t allowed to open his mail.</p>
<p>So it’s against the law to open mail addressed to someone else, but at the same time we are apparently under no obligation to return the mail to the post office. After all, sometimes it’s just junk mail (funniest are the credit card offers :).) Given that we are free to throw the mail away, what difference does it make whether we open it or not? Is it against the law to open a piece of mail that you find in the garbage?</p>
<p>I generally toss out junk mail for the previous owners (3+ years ago) but on anything that looks important I write “Not at this address” on the outside and drop it back in the mailbox.</p>
<p>Even better was when we had a couple of police officers come to the door looking for the previous owner… I was kind of surprised they hadn’t checked to see who owned the house now.</p>
<p>Sylvan, the best thing you can do is write no longer at this address and return it to the sender… Don’t just call them. Even if it’s been more then 3 years. From a corporate perspective of someone who works for a very very very large company, if your old neighbor didn’t change his address with us, we have no way of knowing that he moved… so we keep mailing things to the address that we have for him/her. Sometimes, if they left their new address with the post office we will get the letter back with a yellow sticker on it saying so and so is now at this address. (I never really understood how that worked… because if they had the new address why didn’t they just forward the mail to them there… Maybe they do this if mail forwarding has expired?) If we get either an envelope with a yellow sticker or a regular piece of returned mail with that writing on it it obviously notifies us there is an issue somewhere. So we make an attempt to find the new address (it’s easy when it’s a yellow sticker on the envelope), and we mail them a letter to their (hopefully) current address telling them we need them to call us to update their records. We flag their account as don’t mail things till they contact us in the mean time. Those returned letters to us can’t change the address for the person, only the actual person can change their address… but at least they get the ball moving towards hopefully getting it changed in the future.</p>
<p>I still get mail for the people who lived here prior to myself. I’ve mailed every single piece of it back to them. It’s slowly tapering off. I used to get four or five pieces a week, now I get maybe one a month. My guess is that the other companies use a system similar to ours.</p>
<p>We’ve been dealing with this for nine years. The people that lived here before us ran a business from home. Two years after we moved in, we came home to find 22 boxes covering our entire front porch. It was supplies for the previous owner. I called them, they apologized and immediately came to get them. Another time, I stopped a delivery when I saw a tractor-trailer pull up in front of the house and a man start unloading boxes. Here it is nine years later and we’re still receiving mail for them. I grew tired of writing “not at this address” on all those envelopes and dropping them back in the mailbox. Now, I just toss them in the recycling bag.</p>
<p>Soon after I moved in I noticed the person who lived here before me was getting lots of mail from Direct TV. I mailed it back and like a week or so later a giant box came addressed to them. I went outside and saw their dish attached to my roof, lol! I mailed back the box with a note taped to the top saying they don’t live here anymore and that if they want their dish they can send someone to climb up on the roof and get it. It’s been two years and the thing is still up there… but I haven’t gotten a single letter or another box in the mail since.</p>