to ask what you do with previous occupants' post?

[myoriginal3]

Moving house and there is post there from previous occupiers.

Do you?

A: discard
B: state 'return to sender' and put in post box
C: state 'not know at this address' and put in post box
D: retain indefinitely
E: open to have a nose through?

Forgot to mention, anything else gets a "not at this address" and goes in the postbox.

Mine left a forwarding address so I did that for about a year then started returning to sender.

Recently I received 2 large parcels from overseas which made it a bit awkward. They cost about £50 to send so I didn't want to send them back and I didn't have the forwarding information anymore. It all worked out though, the sender had a phone number but it was inconvenient!!!

I had loads of post coming for the previous tenant. I looked them up on Facebook to see if I could give it directly to them (small town). Turns out she was a mum at DS' school, so I returned it to her when it arrived. We chatted so often as a result of these post exchanges that we've become quite good friends

I binned obvious junk mail. Otherwise I put return to sender on it. With Christmas cards I opened them to see if they had a sender's address in them and forwarded if they did binned if they didn't. If people can't be bothered to pay for their mail to be forwarded I'm not doing it all for them for free.
If they left a forwarding address I'd make it clear I expected them to pay the GPO to forward their mail not expect me to do it.

I returned to sender for about 6 months. Then I started getting final warnings and letters from debt collectors so I started opening them and ringing the company as some of them were to inform me they'd be coming to remove goods on x date or whatever.

Still get the occasional letter now I bin it unless it looks important.

Junk mail - bin it
Looks important/personal, has sender's address on envelope - return to sender, not known at this address
Looks important/personal, no address on envelope - open it (this is legal) then decide whether to bin it, keep it or return to sender.

C, indefinitely.

Bin it. We've been here nearly 5 years now and still get mail. For the first year I would pop it round but I really think if they cannot be bothered to redirect or to change their addresses then it isn't on. They actually got ratty at one point (they moved locally) but we are extremely busy and I don't have the time 5 years on to keep doing this for them.

The thing will writing not known at this address and returning them to debt collection agencies is that people will do that even when it is sent to them.

Write new address on if i have it and put back in post box.

If i don't have a forwarding address then return to sender with 'not known at this address'

If no return address and looks important then open to look for contact details of sender.

Junk mail - bin

Catalouges - read

Return to sender, then after about a year, opened one by accident in with my mail and it was a letter threatening to send bailiffs to the house as they hadn't responded to previous letters. We opened everything after that, and found they'd been running up debts still using their previous address (many thousands of pounds). Took a lot of phone calls and stress to sort it out. 4 or 5 years later we were still getting the occasional letter asking if we knew of their whereabouts.

Open it!! Started opening our previous owners post after i got a doorstep visit from a baliff! He was very polite and accepted what i told him (previous occupants debt) once i showed him some ID and proof we'd just got our mortgage and moved in etc but since then i opened all post and wrote a letter saying that i had opened this letter in error as the new occupant and when the previous occupant had moved out etc. Eventually after about 6 months stopped getting any more debt letters for them and no more baliff visits!!

I opened one once (accidently) and it was the building society telling my landlord they were repossessing the house that we had been paying rent on! Cue several frantic phone calls...

At another address the previous owners opened new bank accounts at my address 6 months after moving out... I informed the bank but it carried on blithely so I started binning the endless bloody post. Ok I admit I was probably wrong a bit cross, but ended up having to give a statement down the police station when somebody started spending on the binned bank cards (not me, honestly!)
Oh well.