“Advice for ‘returning to sender’ successfully?”

Allie asks: “Not returning to sender help! Lots of tax documents and other mail from USPS that’s for several other people who no longer live at our address. Advice for “returning to sender” successfully?”

Some early suggestions:

USPS says: “Please take this mail to the post office for assistance with return to sender.”

Others say:

“I use a sharpie to black out any bar codes (look for faint orange ones on the back), draw a line through the address but not the name, and write “RTS not at this address” on the envelope.”

“Yes! You must completely cover the bar codes or else the mail will be routed automatically back to your address, not returned to the sender.”

“Some tax docs cannot be forwarded – DC real estate tax docs for example will not be forwarded regardless of what you write on the envelope. Learned this one the hard way when my tax docs never arrived and I chased down why”

“Write on the envelope. Most mail from agencies or business that are return to sender will be sent back to who sent them. Writing they no longer live there in the right corner will let them know the person didn’t just return it.”