If you’re moving, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ASK THE USPS TO FORWARD YOUR MAIL. Mine has now been held since the 1st of February even though I did not submit the change of address until the 6th. The 1st was the date I asked the carrier for a change of address form and he apparently took it upon himself to start holding my mail at that point. According to the post office, that is routine procedure: The carrier can hold your mail and put it in postal limbo if he has some vague reason to believe you are about to move. Once you submit the request, it takes “7 to 10 postal business days” to get start getting mail. In the meantime, there is no way to check the status of the change request, even to find out if it was placed in the system, nor is there any way to find and retrieve your mail from whatever box, attic, or dumpster it has been stashed in.

Since I had no idea what had become of the original change request, and the online process looked a lot more straightforward, I submitted a new change of address online. Unfortunately, I have now found that this starts the process all over again even though the old and new addresses are exactly the same as on the original written request. I will not receive my mail until the first week in March, over a month after they started holding it.

There was a pretty good reason I didn’t submit the request until the 6th, btw: I was expecting some important documents and thought I would wait until they arrived at the old address. Thanks to the carrier’s “initiative” they have disappeared into a black hole, and nobody with USPS seems to have a problem with this.

Incidentally, I moved about 7 blocks within the same zip code. Since the old house is still vacant I would have been better off just letting the mail go there until I could update everyone on the new address.