What does you postal office do when the correct address is not on your mail?

:) This discussion is right up my ally. I was actually a city letter carrier for 7 years and in management for 3 years. First of all there should only have been one stamp on the mail you received. That was not very professional. As for whether people normally receive mail that has been adressed incorrectly - that depends. If the name of the town is wrong than it is no big deal. Everything is sorted by the postal code. If a suite number is missing there is a good chance the mail will still be received correctly because the mail carrier will be quite familiar with the NAMES of the businesses and persons within them. Apartments are much more difficult. In this situation it depends on the carrier on your route. If it is someone that has been on your route for a period of time than they try to be familiar with all of the names associated with the addresses and will make an attempt to deliver correctly. If the route has changing mail carriers than often the item will be returned to sender as "no such number". The thing to keep in mind is that there are usually between 500-1000 addresses per carrier route so knowing everyones name can take time and can be a daunting task. I know many letter carriers that take a lot of pride in ensuring that their customers receive their mail no matter how poorly the item is addressed. Unfortunately, there are some that don't have that dedication either. I hope this satisfies some of your curiosity. I have not worked for the postal service in over 5 years but my husband is still a letter carrier. Of course my answer is in regard to mail delivery in the United States. :)

The mailperson has always been able to deliver all my mail even the ones that have my address incorrect. Whether I lived in a big city like Chicago or in a small town I have always been able to get the mail. There was once when someone sent me a letter that was for the right street address but had the wrong town written it. I was amazed when I got that one.

Oh no we don't have this problem in our country as we have to notify the post office when we change our address but if only the full address is not on there well they will not say anything to us but maybe due to you living in America they would have to do that with the amount of people that live in America, so I can understand the reason why the post office would do this in your country but they don't do it here in Australia but we always receive our mail as long as we have told the post office where we live.

It will depend on whether they can guess. Quite often, I see written on the envelope "try this unit xxx" when someone gets my unit number wrong. Or if the postman is one who has been regularly sending mails to my block, then he/she might recognise the names and do the necessary. We also have a box where we can stuff the wrongly mailed items. Sometimes we receive things addressed to our address but not to someone in our house. So we just stuff it into that box. Either that or we will dump it. I know some people have a habit of opening the envelope for curiosity. I don't. I think it is rude. If I can't return the envelope to the right person, I simply trashed the whole thing without opening it.

I live in a small country town so the post office workers know who i am & if there's a mistake i always get the mail anyway. Sometimes they will cross outt he address that's written (like if an old friend sends it to the last address we had - but only because the mail has to come through this post office before it goes to the next one) but otherwise, everything usually arrives fine. They would have just returned that package to the person who sent it with a stamp that says 'Incorrect Mailing Address' or something like that - if the postie didn't know it was for you! The only way it's likely to be lost or misplaced at least, is if the person who sent it to you, forgot to put a return address on the envelope.

I live in baltimore maryland and down here when the mail is incorrect they usually know anyway because in my neighborhood everyone knows everyone and that is ok.

I've not had a situation like that but my mail always seems to be getting delivered to one of my neighbours or I'm getting someone else's mail. I live in a block of flats but there's only 4 of us in the block and all the door numbers are clearly marked. Goodness knows what he would do if something wasn't properly addressed. I despair with our postie sometimes!

I've never had the wrong address put on my mail. I believe that they are supposed to return the mail to the sender, but they probably don't always do that.

Well, sorry to hear that. Thankfully, everytime we move we always give the post office a forwarding address. So far, we got all our mails and nothing got lost.

Our postie man is pretty good. He know where everyone lives, so it dosnt really matter if it is addressed wrong. He'll just knock on the door if he is unsure.

I think if the mail carrier does not know where the mail should go due to an incomplete address, and doesn't know the name on the letter, it gets sent back to the sender marked "No such address" or something similar. In my current house, I have never gotten mail that had my address wrong on it, so either it was sent back, or no one has written my address wrong. When I lived in my apartment, I would still get my mail if the apt # was wrong, so long as the building # was right, since our names were on our boxes.

In the Philippines, the SOP is return to the sender. BUt sometimes, neither return to the sender nor received by the addressee is not done.

Depends! My mailman knows who we are and most people in the neighborhood, so he would recognize the name and be able to deliver providing it got to his truck. But I have sent stuff stuipdly with missing parts of an address if I was in a rush and it's been returned to me. My regular mail guy is great though, he has brought me lots of mail, that was mis-addressed.

Were friendly with our postie too, so we've never had a problem.

I live in a pretty small town and know all the postal carriers personally. I think they would deliver my mail if it had nothing but my first name and city listed. haha I have never had a problem like that, but I suppose it is one of the benefits of small town living.