Getting suspicious mail from prior homeowners?
When to use "Not At This Address," "Return To Sender" and other mailing options to stop unwanted postal mail
If you haven’t already scrambled to change your passwords after the data breach that affected 16 billion Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram and Github login credentials, now is as good of a time as any. But while homeowners (and tenants) are checking digital access, it’s time to get the postal mail complications under control too.
Whether you’re a member of a condo board and seeing mail pile up on the mailbox shelf of a tenant who is long gone, you’re the landlord of a tenant who left or you’re a new homeowner, it may be time to make a trip to the post office to figure out the snail mail situation.
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Don’t expose yourself to questionable packages
When my family first moved into a single-family home, it was clear that the prior homeowner was either using this place as a middle-income trap house or had just given up entirely on upkeep. Our family was constantly getting all of his mail, including what looked like important state and federal mail. Random neighbors would use our gangway like it was a mall concourse. And we’d had two break-ins.
Considering our family originally lived in an apartment across the alley, we were shocked at how the next block was behaving. My (very stubborn) parents refused to be run out of the neighborhood. They got a dog, an alarm system, and a side and back gate installed. (Almost four decades later, this is still their home, the gate became a garage and they’re now on their third dog.)
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But the mail for the prior homeowner just kept piling up, and we couldn’t wrap our minds around why he wasn’t getting his mail forwarded elsewhere. Unlike this Reddit user whose neighbor’s kid is using his address to receive questionable packages that he doesn’t want his parents to know about, we didn’t get the impression that the guy who previously owned my childhood home was trying to dump his dirt on us.
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He just disappeared. And whatever was going on with him, we wanted no parts of. But when a prior resident doesn’t bother getting his own mail forwarded or stopped, what can the new residents do? And what happens when “Return To Sender” mail keeps getting returned to you?