USPS Change of Address Issues

It has come to our attention that some of our customers are reporting that their USPS Change of Address requests are either not working or getting canceled without their knowledge.

Change of Address Not Working

Under normal circumstances, after you have filed a Change of Address (CoA), you should receive two confirmation notices via physical letter from the USPS. One will be sent to the original address and the other will be sent to your new address.  The notice is usually sent to you within 1 week of filing this CoA with USPS.

Some small number of customers have reported that they are not receiving this notice or, if they did, mail is still not getting forwarded.  Based on our findings, here's what we can determine:

• While the CoA has an ACTIVE status shown, mail is still not getting forwarded at all.  
• You may or may not receive the confirmation letter, but mail may still not get forwarded.
• We tested sending out a trackable Priority Mail piece to a forwarded address.  The tracking status showed that mail was delivered at the address.  Our test letter did not get forwarded even though the CoA system shows that forwarding is active.

We've come to the conclusion that, for some reason, USPS Change of Address requests are not getting honored by their own system and mail is not getting forwarded.  This leads to you not getting your mail here at our facility when you think it should be. 

When this happens, you may think that we're not scanning your mail or that we are an unreliable service.  This is understandably a valid assumption but certainly not true.  After all, our business is built on top of processing your mail.  If you don't get mail, we don't really have a service to offer, so it would not make sense for us to do that.

Recommended Resolution: We highly recommend that you do not make use of the Change of Address forwarding feature offered by the USPS.  Instead, manually update your mailing address with each individual mailer.  We understand that this is an inconvenient process, but it is the most reliable way to get your mail.  We have seen many instances where, even when the Change of Address is working, mail does not get properly forwarded.

Users with USPS Informed Delivery Service

Another reported problem from our clients has been that their filed Change of Address somehow got canceled without their knowledge or consent.  This happened to a small number of people.

According to a client of ours, he subscribed to the  USPS Informed Delivery service at his home. Once he filed his change of address, he subsequently received an email notice stating that his Informed Delivery service would be canceled since his mail would be redirected to a new address. The notice mentioned that he could login to reactivate his Informed Delivery if that's what he wanted.  However, the notice was not clear on what would happen to his Change of Address request if he did so.

Resolution: When you activate USPS Informed Delivery service, the Change of Address request will get canceled automatically.  If you are subscribed to the USPS Informed Delivery, you cannot use it once you have filed a Change of Address when forwarding mail to another address. Therefore, if you do receive an email notice stating that your Informed Delivery Service is going to be canceled due to your Change of Address filing, please do not attempt to continue your Informed Delivery service any longer.