To not be wanting to be bothered by past owner's mail

[redoneslast]

Three years on.
Its getting irritating.

I do return to sender and post it back. That seems to have got rid of a lot. My mum had a word with her postman when she was getting loads and he said he would stop it and return it direct from the post office and she never got any more after that.
Though four years after moving in the previous owners of her house turned up on the doorstep looking for a letter that should have just arrived and when DM said she returned all post they had a go at her!

We moved out of our last house 6 years ago but the sainted new owners sent us a hospital appointment for DD1 that got sent to them in error last week. No idea how / why NHS sent there - referral was via our current doctor who we only signed up with after moving. Completely understand how annoying it is (and I admit to binn

I sympathise, we moved 10 years ago but still get previous owners post occasionally, I go out of my way to make sure they get.

However, my reason for posting is because the owners of our old house also get post for us, 2 christmas letters stand out. 1 from an old friend telling me that she had breast cancer and the other from old friends who were telling us that tragically their daughter had died.

I think that although both had know our new address, in their times of sadness they had sent it to the old address. I will forever be grateful to the people in our old house, for taking the time to drop the post in. I would have hated our old friends to have thought that we did not care.

You can contact Royal Mail and ask them not to deliver any more mail if the person doesn't live there. Ask the postman/lady when you see them next.

If you are getting DVLA marked mail you can also deal with this without opening it.

Years ago we were receiving loads of parking fines from the previous tenant from loads of London Boroughs. You can tell they are red from the envelope window. We could also tell because the bailiffs were turning up consistently. The rental agency contacted her to change her address but she ignored them.

We called the DVLA and they cleared our address from her driving records. This meant that no further fines would come to our house, and, if she was stopped by the police she'd be in a shitload of trouble for not reporting a change of address.

I bin them. If it comes from the NHS or a charity I might return to sender.

Illegal? Are you serious? Not that it would ever come to court, but nobody would be able to prove that the letters were delivered to my house.

We've been in our house for 15 months and we still get mail to the old owners. The junk gets binned - I honestly don't care if it's illegal - we tried "return to sender, not at this address" for about 8-9 months and it's still coming so I really don't know what else we can do - it's the kind of thing I would bin even if it was addressed to me!

The official stuff is more difficult - we get post from their kids' school (private school, and some of them look like bills) - Why on earth wouldn't you tell your child's school that you had moved? I'm sure the school knows too - the kids must have mentioned it - but obviously it hasn't filtered back to the office that they are still using an old address.

More importantly though we get bank statements and other official mail addressed to the company which the previous owners ran. It is a consultancy business and this address was the given address for the company. We have checked online and it would appear it is still the registered address at companies house! We return to sender for those ones, but they keep on coming! We took them to the royal mail sorting office once and spoke to them about it, but they said there was nothing we could do - they were very sympathetic, but acknowledged that we just had to keep returning them. They did suggest bundling them up and just doing it once every 1-2 months rather than every time a letter came in.

We are moving abroad in the new year and our house will be rented out - have no idea what our tenants will do with mystery mail, particularly as they are likely to be non-UK nationals who may not be aware of the legal side of things in the UK.

homework if the previous owners company is still registered at your address, you can phone companies house (0303 1234 500) and tell them about it. They should take it seriously.

We went through a phase of receiving cheque books for the previous tenant of our house. We kept returning to sender writing "not at this address" on the envelope but more still came (I can only assume she kept contacting the bank saying she hadn't received them so they just kept on sending more and neither party thought to confirm the address).

Eventually we worked out which bank it was using the return address on the back of the envelope and took the cheque books into the branch. We stopped getting them after that.

Although we're still getting her netball magazines and letters from bloody TalkTalk trying to sell her stuff, despite returning each and every one to sender.

How do you know what it is if you aren't opening it?

What do you do with it atm? "Return to sender, not known at this address" that does tend to get rid of quite a bit but it does take a fair while!

Also have you checked the electoral register to make double sure they're not still on there?

Thank you MrsSquirrel - going to phone later today - hopefully that will put an end to it once and for all. We don't have a forwarding address for them and the solicitors don't either as they moved into another property they already owned after they moved out of here and have since moved again but sold and bought through a different agency and we don't know who.

My dh bought his house in 1989. Previous owner had passed away about 6 years previous to that.
Earlier this year I got loads of letters from the co-op, telling this chap he hadn't used his divvy card for a while, and they were thinking of closing his account!!
I kept a straight face when I rang them up, but it was a close run thing!

We've been here 7 years and still get post for previous owners. For the first couple of years I marked it return to sender and posted it, now it goes in the recycling.

Illegal . Then I'm a regular law breaker. Nobody is going to find out, ever. Been living here almost 3 years and still get the odd letter for a few other people. If it was important they'd have changed their address by now so what the heck. Their own fault.

I am the only one to have ever lived at my house. If I get any post not in my name I open it, I dont car if it is technically legal.

This is the only way I found ouit someone was trying to open accounts at my address

sorry illegal

It is an offence to tamper with mail and it's obviously an offence to steal mail and clearly that's to deal with posties who don't deliver or neighbours who appropriate other people's mail.

I can't see how it can possibly be an offence to bin unsolicited mail for people you don't know sent to your address with no return address.

You can't necessarily assume it even is the former owner or tenant. I've been at my current address for donkeys' years and have owned a rental flat for years. I occasionally get mail addressed to people who are definitely not living in my house ( I think I'd have noticed!) and were definitely not my tenants.

It is an offence to tamper with mail and it's obviously an offence to steal mail and clearly that's to deal with posties who don't deliver or neighbours who appropriate other people's mail.

I can't see how it can possibly be an offence to bin unsolicited mail for people you don't know sent to your address with no return address.

You can't necessarily assume it even is the former owner or tenant. I've been at my current address for donkeys' years and have owned a rental flat for years. I occasionally get mail addressed to people who are definitely not living in my house ( I think I'd have noticed!) and were definitely not my tenants.

National Heritage only stopped sending the membership cards each year when, on the 5th year, I wrote "still not at this address for over 5 years. If you send the cards next year I'll assume I can use them".

We had all sorts. Including phone messages about how if their son didn't return his time sheet then he wouldn't get his redundancy pay. I did manage to talk to his college tutor about how he hadn't been attending or doing coursework and was about to be thrown off his apprenticeship anyway.

We lived at our previous house for 12 years. When we moved we were still getting letters (and Xmas cards) for the previous owners.

Then we went into a rental for 9 months and the previous tenants didn't bother to redirect their mail. They left their new address and asked us to forward. Fair enough for a few weeks but they hadn't even told their friends. I got very fed up very quickly.

The worst thing was that as soon as I'd had the phone connected we started getting calls for them . One of the calls was from her father . It got to the point where every time it rang it was for them, and not for us. My messages on the front of their redirected mail got more and more terse, and I got less and less polite with repeat callers.

I have an ongoing issue with a complete wanker woman who has the same name as me (different salutation) who credit agencies / lenders wrongly assumed they had tracked down to my address. I opened her letters because I initially thought they were for me (only the salutation was different) and it wasn't until a few letters/calls down the line I realised what was happening she borrowed money from any fucker who would lend it to her but rarely bothered paying any of it back Three years later and I still have her black marks against my address because she can't ever pay back what she borrows and people who lend money are fucking stupid Fucking nightmare sharing her name. And I will absolutely open any of her sodding post that comes to my address - legal or not.

I've also had people use my address illegally (new build so no-one ever lived here before me) - once for getting credit and once for some kind of employment thing. I wouldn't have known what was going on if I didn't open the post that was addressed to them. I opened it because return to sender didn't work and I was worried given the above situation.

I will absolutely open ANY mail that comes through my letterbox ever again due to all this fucked up stuff happening. CAN PEOPLE JUST FUCKING STOP TRYING TO STEAL MY ADDRESS!?!??!

Touchy, I know.

If you receive any kind of benefits then you really ought to return any wrongly received mail to sender. My SIL was investigated for benefit fraud because they thought she had someone else living there, due to the amount of mail she was getting in her landlord's name!

It is not 'illegal' to open mail incorrectly addressed to you unless you intend to act to the person's detriment:

"A person commits an offence if, intending to act to a person’s detriment and without reasonable excuse, he opens a postal packet which he knows or reasonably suspects has been incorrectly delivered to him." Postal Services Act 2000

I doubt the CPS will be falling over themselves to prosecute junk mail binners.

Agree but next to post box and just crossed though and put not know at addresse and dropped in postbox. Not my problem....

I am stunned by the number of people who play right into lazy/corrupt ex-tenants' hands by enabling them. Don't send on, send back.

Don't ge tme wrong - if it's just a few instances, and it very quickly drops off, that's different.

We made up labels, saying "Return to sender - occupant has moved away. Remove from database" and most of the post trickled off pretty well after that.

Some persistent posters didn't get the hint for a while, but we'd also kept a really low-tech database (A4 lined pad with date and sender) of any sender information we could find without opening the envelope (company logo or postcode, for instance). After a while, if we wanted to, we would add to the labels "you're been told xx times".

A previous landlord did the "forward my post" thing. We refused. The agency tried to give us grief, but we pointed out that part of our lease that said we weren't to engage in any business, and that providing secretarial service, even if unpaid, is exactly that. Turns out most of the post was from the bank, whose mortgage wasn't buy-to-let.

I still get letters for the vicar and I have lived here for thirteen years.

I inadvertently opened a letter informing the vicar someone was coming to tune the church organ so I popped across to the the church with it. I explained the situation to the elderly warden who was cleaning up. He nodded then asked me what time I would be coming to tune the organ. It did cross my mind to go upstairs and pretend to tune it.

At my previous address which I rented, I continually received letters marked urgent from a building society. Turned out the house was about to be repossessed. The landlord hadn't told us and he hadn't told them he had tenants in on a twelve month lease.