How to return post directed to previous residents

Post that is directed to previous tenants happens often in your mailbox? 
Either that you are living in a student house or you just bought a house, it probably happens that you still get post that is not meant to you. 
I’ve been there, and I have always tried to personally return the post when possible, but there is a more efficient – automatic – way to do that!

If you consider that student houses are characterized by a large number of tenants over time, like 6, that is not even that crazy, maybe staying for short time periods, you’ll end up in a long list of people living at that address in a couple of years. That often results in a huge amount of post delivered to the student house while you are there.

But in our experience, that can also happen (with reduced volumes) after buying a house.
You can do your best to change addresses to all services (I have even made a list of them while moving myself – you can find it at this link!), but be sure you’ll forget something.

How can you simply resolve this issue?
You can officially notify the post system that the previous tenant is not living there any longer. And guess what? That’s simple! Here the instructions in only 3 steps:

  1. Mark with a cross the address information
  2. Write ‘Vertrokken – Retour afzender’ (literally: left – return to sender)
  3. Insert the post in an orange post box or deliver it to a PostNL hub

    PostNL will send back all the mails to the sender, even if you have given the new address of the tenant.

You can find the original information from PostNL here.

And what if you did receive post that was meant for another address?

In that case, you can simply place the mail back in an orange post box or deliver it to a PostNL hub. They will take care that the post is then delivered to the correct address.
Instead, if there is no address at all (i.e. you’d like to stop receiving advertising folders, and possibly free door-to-door newspapers, you can consider placing a sticker on the mailbox. More information in this post). 

Did you find the information you needed? Please help sharing to help others as well.
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Doei!
Marta

Last updated 24-09-2020 (disclaimer)
Featured image by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash.

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