[privong]

Post people know how to read, but I think now most nail sorting/routing is done with computers and OCR. I sometimes get mail addressed to people who used to live at my address but have long since moved. I tried writing “return to sender, addressee not at this address” or similar things but the mail kept coming back to me. I finally went into the post office and they said that the machines would just rescan the address and send it right back to my address for delivery. So I think relying on postal employees to see/interpret things on address labels is no longer a viable approach in many places.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

No, not really. Sorting is always manual when automation fails.

In your case, automation actually didn't fail, it just didn't recognize your additional instruction. Probably, you could have just patched the address with an easily removable piece of tape and that would definitely trigger a human attention, and delivery would go where it should

[lb1lf]

-My parents (living in rural Norway) once had a postcard delivered where the address given was simply their first names - no last name, no street, no town, no nothing.

Having a database in which every citizen's domicile is registered does have its occasional advantages.

[swilliamsio]

Similarly, there was a story going round a few years back about mail being delivered in Iceland where instead of an address there was a map to the house to be delivered: http://i.imgur.com/1GVjLKF.jpg

[mkasu]

I live in Japan. I once had a package delivered from overseas where their printers couldn’t print CJK fonts and thus the whole address resulted in just small empty boxes. The post office inferred my address from the post code + my name and delivered it correctly. There wasn’t even a (noticeable) delay.

[privong]

> Probably, you could have just patched the address with an easily removable piece of tape and that would definitely trigger a human attention, and delivery would go where it should

Fair point. And that was the advice given to me by the postal service.

[tialaramex]

Cross through the wrong address. Every year or two somebody from the management agency tidies the noticeboard for the building I live in and removes my hand written sign explaining how this works. Then, next September/October when lots of people move in (some fraction of the occupants are students) the noticeboard gets envelopes pinned to it with undeliverable mail. I write a fresh sign.

The sign is a flowchart, it says first, is this mail for a different address? If so, either redeliver it (duh) or write "Misdelivered" in bold leters and put it into any postbox.

If not, but you don't recognise the recipient, strike through the whole address in black pen and write clearly "Not at this address" then put it into the postbox.

This won't stop you getting more mail by the way, I still get letters labelled "Urgent" with the name of the previous owner years after I bought this place. But it does stop literally the same mail coming back since the OCR will reject the crossed out address -- it's just that the sender may not have any effective process for what to do when they get the mail back undeliverable.