Is it legal to throw away another person’s mail?
Written by admin on January 10th, 2009
If it’s sent to your address?
At my house we get mail for 8 to 10 different people who no longer live here. I’ve minimized it by returning to sender and crossing off the address, but we still get a lot of this stuff all the time, and most of it is clearly unimportant (credit card ads, newsletters, etc.).
I know it’s illegal to open and read them, but is it legal to simply throw them away (or recycle them, in this case)? Am I obligated to just continue accepting mail for someone I don’t know and sending it back?
January 12th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
I have the same problem also. I get mail from previous tenants all the time, however, there isn’t much you can do but throw it away.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:59 am
First class not nice. People who never get a credit card bill naturally don’t pay the minimum and get charged an astronomical fee
any other mail the p.o. throws away if you hand it back to them because it was misdirected. Their answer- it’s too expensive to figure out where it goes. I see this all the time because I get other peoples mail ALL the time.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
How about contacting the local post office and give them the list of names of the people you are receiving mail for and request that it be stopped.
P.S. If people cared to receive their mail then they would make sure to request a address change, So throw it out.