Investor · North Pole, AK · Member since 2014 · 89 posts · 16 votes
I bought a vacant property that is being rehabbed and it keeps getting a lot of mail every day. They are addressed to many different people not noticeably related by name. I’ve held the mail for 30 days through the USPS and selected for me to pick it up after that. The USPS will "Return to Sender" if not picked up by a certain amount of days. I am going to start another hold mail for another 30 days but was wondering if anyone knew of a method I can use to stop all this mail from arriving. Thanks.
I typically remove the mailbox when I'm doing a rehab (unless I'm expecting any mail there). I caught the mailman one day and he told me he couldn't deliver mail if there was no box, so that's an option.
With apartments that have had a lot of old junk mail, I usually have the tenant go in to the nearest post office with the mail and explain that this person is in no way associated with the property and they'd like to not receive their mail anymore.
I still receive junk mail from a previous owner of my house after both writing "Return to Sender" on some stuff and leaving it in the mailbox AND going to the PO and telling them to stop delivering. Good luck!
My parents used to get mail to my PO box. My dad died in 2008. He still gets mail occasionally, usually from insurance companies. I mark it "deceased" and return it, but it doesn't do any good.
Take a look at the stamp or the corner where the stamp should be. If it says "Presort Standard" or "PRSRT STD", then you can't do anything about it through the post office. This is the really cheap junk-mail postage, and the post office doesn't provide return service for it. You might be able to stop some of it at https://www.dmachoice.org/index.php , but that site will also try to sign you up for more mail, so pay attention to what you click.
If it's anything else, you can usually have it returned to the sender by writing on it and remailing it. There is a specific wording you have to use and you might check with your local post office for what they want. What usually works for me is to write "Return to Sender. No longer at this address" and the date, and then drop it in the outgoing mail box at the post office.
If you read the fine print on store flyers and catalogs, sometimes they will give you an address you can write or a phone number to call to get off of their mailing list. I've never used one of these, because as far as I can tell, all it does is confirm that there's a live human at that address, so then they can resell the address for more money.
There are some things that just never stop. At home, I get two or three pieces of mail a year that are addressed to the original owner of the house, who hasn't owned it since approximately the mid-1990s. These are all Presort Standard, so I just chuck them in the recycle bin.