In the mail today was an envelope which had:

A picture of the U.S. Capitol
OFFICIAL BUSINESS
FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY
DO NOT DISCARD*
Receive Your FREE Government Benefits
Informational Brochure

For the curious, it was about prepaying funeral expenses.

*I discarded since I have a Wisdom >= 10

Was it addressed to "Current Resident"? Because that's a sure sign of super important governmenty documents. Especially if they ask for your social security number and credit card info to verify that you are, in fact, Current Resident. :P

Nope. Had my name, and spelled correctly too.

Hehehe half the mail I get is for Current resident. Most of the rest is for other people.

Hehe ... I love stuff that arrives at my place stamped "OPEN IMMEDIATELY" or "IMMEDIATE ATTENTION REQUIRED" and has no return address and is bulk posted. That says instant shredder to me.

For years now, a solid decade at least, I have managed my grandmother's finances as she is no longer able to.

I'm disgusted by the sheer volume of predatory junk mail the elderly receive.

In reply to drewalt (msg # 6):

Word

99% of the mail we get goes from mailbox to trash can, unexamined save for a cursory glance and unopened.

I get my bills delivered via email, available online.  Likewise letters.  I pay my bills online as well.

Even things I order are invariably delivered by FedEx and UPS.

The US postoffice is a dinosaur, rapidly heading for extinction, unless they figure out a way to make themselves relevant again -- and they're not going to do that delivering bulk mail to clog up the recycling bins and filling landfills.

They were threatening to close post offices 1 day a week, and as far as I'm concerned, they could close 6.5 days a week and I'd never notice.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:49, Thu 25 Aug 2016.

I got a HUGE manila envelope the other day, addressed to me, with the words 'FRAGILE', 'URGENT', and 'TIME SENSITIVE' stamped all over it. The whole thing probably weighed two pounds. Walking up the driveway, I thought, "Aw jeez...what now?" When I got in the house, I sat down in my office, tore it open, and read the letter:

"Dear EIGHTBITEIGHTIES,

Have you ever considered what your family would do without you? Here at [life insurance company], we believe that paying blah, blah, blah...Sign up now by returning the included forms in the provided SASE. Here's a free monogrammed tie clip as our gift to you."

I shredded the letters, but hey, FREE TIE CLIP! Now I can look really spiffy when I perform a wedding!

I still get mail for my mom. She died back in 2010.
Most recently it's been from places wanting to put my condo on sale. I only moved in last December, and here are these vultures trying to get it sold out from under me. The other ones are the standard 'burial policies' of which I have taken care of years ago. 2 of my relatives chose cremation and as such I have a choice in burial plots (does not matter to me which, I will be dead after all).
Then of course you got the sharks looking for easy elderly targets and sending me phishing type letters.
I was a volunteer system admin for a couple of years, my job was to stop advertisers and porn bombs and other malicious stuff from hitting the site (site was set up to help teenagers learn programming - site eventually fell to Russian porn bombs, got hit by so many at one time it crashed the site.) But since then I am extra paranoid to scams and other crap I get in mail. I am one of those that reports this activity to sites where it's supposedly coming from. Most appreciate it, some treat me like an idiot cause I caught it and thought to be nice and tell them that someone is using their site for scam purposes. (TD Bank was the last one I had this happen from, got an unsolicited app text supposedly from them, called them to let them know and was told they don't do that and not to click on the link (repeatedly) and their operator talked down to me like I was an idiot child for having the audacity to call and let them know someone had hacked their app store.)
End of Rant.

To EightBitEighties: Nice - love the ones that send presents.

In reply to Nintaku (msg # 2):

Wait.... My name is Current Resident!!!! You mean to tell me that those letters REALLY weren't addressed to me?! NOOOO!!!

I should change my name.... Does Towhomitmay Concern sound good?

In reply to Jordan Task (msg # 11):

I keep getting your mail. For the love of Odin's beard file a change of address form. :-P

In reply to Merevel (msg # 12):

It's not me. I just have a common name. At least one in every household, apparently....

On a marginally related note...I'm still getting occasional mail for previous tenants.  I've lived in that apartment for thirteen years.  The woman who lived in it before me was there for about a year, I think (because of her, I had a regular supply of Victoria's Secret catalogs for the first three years I lived there...)

But I'm still getting mail for the couple that lived there before her.  You would think, after over a decade of sending mail to someone and getting absolutely no response whatsoever, somebody would take the time to purge the address list.  They don't.

Makes me wonder just how much money is wasted every year on postage.  I mean, bulk mail/junk mail is one thing...but stuff like alumni associations sending donation requests to people who haven't lived there in almost fifteen years?  (And they send them on a fairly regular basis...like, five or six times a year, it seems...)

In reply to facemaker329 (msg # 14):



I like my tie clip and all, but...

But seriously, my alma maters send me some seriously weird stuff. I'm friends with the guy who bought my first house and he brings me the few things that have slipped through USPS's address change system.

My first degree was for a Funeral Director/Mortician's license. The school occasionally sends me a well-known paranormal magazine. I believe in ghosts and all, but really?

My second degree was my "Preacher's Paper", as my professors of Divinity used to call it. In a bizarre bit of the universe messing with me, I get the exact same magazine! with an insert for, you guessed it, my Mortuary School.

If I didn't know any better, I'd swear they were screwing with me.
This message was last edited by the user at 07:04, Fri 26 Aug 2016.

It's the ghosts, they are screwing with you.

I keep getting my neighbor's mail. ... Yes, it's from his mailbox, why do you ask?

I still get mail for the people who lived here before me. The last people who lived here were a retired couple. The husband died so the wife moved to be closer to her children.
I still get mail from his various doctors offices trying to contact him. Even got a phone call once cause of my address (some enterprising person looked up phone numbers connected to addresses in case someone changed their phone number but forgot to tell them.) I informed them he no longer lived here. They asked for his new address, to I told them Heaven, as he had died back in 2012. (I learned that from a neighbor prior to this call.)

At one of the locations where we had a business we kept getting mail for the previous tenant.  Some of it was from his bank, which I thought just might possibly be important, and surely shouldn't be coming to anyone but him.  The bank branch was just over a block away, so I walked the mail down to them and asked them to advise whoever was sending the stuff.  Still took a couple of years before they stopped.

Post office boxes are entirely another mess.  Apparently here, if the person doesn't give a change of address, they will send mail to the old box through infinity, even if the lock has been changed several times for other users, even if it is obvious no one is using the box.  Last place we lived, we didn't use the box related to the address, since we were already renting a box.  When someone did take it over, after about three years, the box was so stuffed the person had trouble clearing it, and with not only our mail, including things that were important and had created problems for us, but mail for multiple tenants from years before.  Also for the box we rented, we got mail there for previous users for a long time.  That was mostly third class stuff though, that they had forgotten, or not bothered, to change the address on.

Sometimes they even update them.

I've moved half a dozen times since I had to put my dad into a group home, moved out, and sold his condo. And he's been dead almost 5 years now. But I occasionally get mail for addressed to his last ex-wife -- and they divorced in '78. So he'd moved twice since then, then I've been a bunch of different places -- and mail addressed to her shows up at my current home....

I think the guys maintaining the address listings get paid a bounty for quantity -- so they never remove anyone.

I still get cheque books and credit cards for the people we bought the house off.... And we've lived in the house for over 14 years now... I used to hand them in at the bank informing them they no longer lived there....still get them every now and then just write no longer at this address and let the post office deal with them

In reply to Fyrerain (msg # 19):

It's not that they're paid by quantity. It's that you have to pay them for the time it takes to go through and remove all the old entries. They have no incentive to do that, since it gains nothing and costs money. It's only when they're threatened with legal action that the cost is justified.

LOL No, quantity is an issue -- companies that buy these lists buy based on the number of addresses provided. But true enough, it's also not worth the time to clean them out.

At the same time, they are investing the time to "update" 20+ year old contact information! My ex-stepmother hasn't been "Mrs. Xyz" since '78 -- but they keep refreshing her information based on my (now deceased) father's changes of address. It'd take less time to delete her.

Or, at least actually send the junk mail to her. Or her son, if she's no longer alive. Then I'd just have to recycle all the mail for the people who used to live at my house.... ;)

I'm actually starting to consider boxing up all my junk mail, and dropping it back into a post office box with 'return to sender' stamped on it all.

In reply to Fyrerain (msg # 22):

The senders are not updating the lists. They're probably doing it by usps change of address lists.

"You've been selected for a survey. And congratulations! You've won a luxury cruise!"