Mail Forwarding While On Road

[Rocinante]

We use St. Brendan’s Isle, but we’re full time. The idea of renting a P.O. box so they’ll hold your mail longer than 30 days while on the road sounds promising if you can’t ask a neighbor or hire one of their kids to pick up your mail and toss it in a grocery sack until you get home.

[BoscoMN]

One word of caution about having your mail forwarded by the USPS. On any mail that says "Do Not Forward", the Post Office will send it back with a note that you are temporarily not at that address. We had some insurance papers that we did not expect that got returned back to the company. Hope nothing else got returned that we did not know about!

And we were just having our mail "forwarded" to a post office box right at our local post office. That also messed up our Informed Delivery. It stopped working 31 days into our trip.

I'm going to see if I can have a local lawyer do the 30 day hold and multiple renews as required for us for the period while we are gone. If the Postmaster will allow them to do that for us that would solve all the glitches within the Post Office software and processes. I'm going to see what it will cost and then if it is not too much I'll try it out before we need it this winter while we are home to see if it will work.

[DreamStreamr]

We started full-timing 2007 and signed on with Escapees mail service. Our mail goes direct to our address with them, we have no other address for mail. We have them send us a pack of all our mail every couple of weeks to wherever we'll be then. Mostly we use General Delivery at a local US Post Office. General Delivery adds nothing to our cost and is almost flawless and secure. Like other services, they offer the full gamut of amenities like scanning, advising if certain sender's package has arrived, and allowing us to specify what mail and magazines do and don't get through to us.

Costs us approx $100/year on top of our annual membership, plus we pay actual USPS priority mail cost each delivery we receive. Best thing? Zero junk mail arrives at our rolling home.

[Re-Pete]

We've used Escapees for over a year and have found them very reliable.

Currently we are full time, so, we use the address they provided us as our permanent address. The address is in Livingston, TX. We use this for mail and credit card billing. It is not our domicile, although eventually it may be.

Our current set up is they send an envelope with our mail in it every two weeks to the address we currently stay at.

When we're traveling we have them hold our mail until we ask for it. They can send it general delivery to a post office where we'll be stopping.

We can call them during open hours and have them to tell us what mail we've received in our mailbox. If we want, we can choose what we want sent and what is junk. They can scan and email if we want. It's very flexible and quite reasonable. I believe they may be the oldest RVers mail service.

They offer several plans. I'm certain you'll find one that can work for you.

We also have all the bills we can set up on automatic payment plans or drafts from our checking account.

I hope this helps,. Good luck, Pete

[SSquared]

Originally Posted by 3bcamper

We are planning to go on the road with 3B, the destination and length of trip are indeterminate. For those of you who are away from home base for a long time and flitting about the continents, what do you do about snail mail?

We want to keep up on important items that cannot wait three or four months. Especially if Ed McMahon notifies me that I may already be a millionaire.

Thanks for your advice.

Tim

I used Traveling Mailbox for about six months last year, and have one important warning about them. Besides their regular service, they offer "premium" addresses for an extra five dollars per month. This means you pick one of a few dozen addresses around the country instead of their North Carolina headquarters. We selected the Aurora, CO address because it is not far from our home, and we thought that would mean better service.

HOWERVER, the way it works is, when mail arrives at the "premium" location, it just gets packed up and sent across country to NC. Only then does it get logged in and listed on the web site for you to see it. Plus, after you sign up, they tell you the premium addresses are restricted to letter and magazine-type mail. No packages. Packages have to go to NC. If you give someone your "premium" address, and they send you a box, Traveling Mailbox bills you for the shipping charge to send it to NC, and also bills you an extra handling fee. We spent almost $20 to get a free coffee mug.

[PatLee]

Thanks for all this information, there are a LOT of mail forwarding services! One note about the 'forwarding' option by USPS (1st class mail only is forwarded). My son and family were transferring overseas and asked if they could forward their mail to me until they got settled. I agreed and within a few weeks, they had their own address. The problem is that while they received only 1st class mail, I continued to receive their 3rd class mail - catalogues, magazines, and then more catalogues, there was so much junk mail. I couldn't stand the idea of it coming to me for 6 months so I spent a couple of mornings calling these catalogue companies and other solicitors and telling them to stop sending it out. Most of them were appreciative of the notification and I feel like I did my little bit to save trees.

[Silver Otter]

For the combination Salem International and Alaska Caravan, we're going to try the Good Sam mail service. I agree the local USPS is often the weak link. https://www.goodsammailservice.com/