I typically receive X pieces of misdelivered (postal) mail ...

I'm not even sure I receive that many pieces of mail per year in total.

is it still considered misdelivered if it has my correct name and address on it?

somehow I landed a subscription to Country Woman, GQ, and Black Enterprise, without ever remembering how I got signed up for them.

I'd love to see the marketing drones trying to analyze my household's demographic based on that.

My neighbor has a jack assed house number. He is on the even side of the street and has created his own odd number. It is out of order and somehow between my next door neighbor and myself, even though he is down the block a few houses. Its ridiculous. So i get his mail. i open it at will and throw large portions of it away. Important stuff i deliver to him. When he first built his house, it was many pieces a day. Now it's probably 5-10 pieces a week. i can always tell when the normal delivery guy is away.
PS. Can we please kill the post office faster?

Just wondering. Is there any point to these surveys? I mean, next one will be: "How much lint to you currently have in your belly button? A) none, B) just a bit C) a big clump ... "

We've lived in our current place for about 3 years now, and we still get at least 1 piece of mail each month for old tenants who rented our place before us!

We've gotten everything from drivers license renewal notices, vehicle registration notices, taxation letters (Australian Tax Office), voting enrollment notices, even had debt collection letters and for a few weeks even phone calls from debt collectors! (They stopped once we advised the debt collector that the old person no longer lives at the address, we don't know them and we had forwarded the matter to the police as we constitute what they are doing to us is harassment - that was after daily calls for 3 weeks asking for the person at ungodly hours, eg calls at 6am, 9pm, 6pm. The police actually did follow the matter up and advised them to stop calling/contacting us once they verified our own claims. I asked for charges to be laid, but they would only do so if they called again once the police asked them to stop).

Mind, not as bad as my mother-in-law. She has received a Christmas card for the last 20 years for the person that lived in her house prior to her. And she and her husband bought their house 20 years ago!

... because the guy who developed my neighborhood was FUCKING STUPID. Within 1/4 mile of my house are two others with the same 4-digit number (yeah, because you need 4-digit house numbers -- ALL in the 1500-3500 range -- in a 480-house subdivision), and one of those two is on a street with a name similar to mine: both are 8 letters, and both start with the same 3 letters. GENIUS.

I received received some junk mail for my first wife who I divorced in 97 when I lived in Virginia. I'm not sure she even knows my Colorado address. I occasionally get a junk letter for my oldest daughter as well.

Otherwise I'll get 1 or 2 a year meant for a misread street or missed by a house or two house number.

[John]

And I still get occasional letters for the previous owners. I used to write on them "return to sender" but after a few years I stopped. Most of the post is advertising and brochures, so I now read them. Some are interesting since he was an electrical contractor.
Occasionally I get letters from collections agencies for random people who I have no idea if they ever lived in the house!
It doen't bother me though.

At home, I probably get 0-3 pieces of mail per year addressed to the person who used to live here. I'm not sure if that counts as misdelivered or not since it's addressed to my address. However, at work, I get an average of at least one a week addressed to one of the other businesses in our building. We're in Suite B, and it's like the mail carrier is just too damn lazy to open the mailbox for Suite A that's six inches away from ours. That doesn't include the mail sent to our address for prior tenants of the office space -- and we've been there a decade -- or to people whose names I don't even recognize. I used to just assume that customers who said they didn't get their bills were full of shit, but I'm starting to be amazed that anybody gets any of their mail, as much of it as I have to send back or deliver myself.

Misdelivered is not very well defined. Here are my stats:
1) Mail addressed to my next door neighbor (once or twice a year)
2) Mail addressed correctly but with a previous owner's name. (once or twice a month)
3) Actual misdelivered mail addressed to someone more than a block away (once or twice total in my lifetime)
#2 is obviously the most frequent but I don't necessarily consider that misdelivered as it arrived at
the correct house but not necessarily the correct person.

We have a lovely old lady living on the top floor, Mrs. Lundqvist. On the 2nd floor, we have a younger couple, Mr. & Mrs. Lundqvist... as I help the old Mrs. Lundqvist with managing her personal finances, I quite often end up acting as a local postman delivering letters to the correct Lundqvist.
It got problematic a couple of years ago - the Lundqvists downstairs got into debt, and ended up with debt collectors coming around to serve collection orders, yet they consistently ended up banging on the wrong door - a stressful thing she could do without, but one that I was well-placed to deal with as my apartment is adjascent to hers, but that is another story :)
So if she was on /., she would definitely be in the 150+ category for mail that is sent to her for which she is not the intended recipient.

The interesting thing for me would be if anyone else receives mail that is meant for her but that goes to the wrong address - if there is, nobody bothers to deliver or repost it... also to know what percentage of mail is mis-delivered. 1 mis-delivered item per month is not too bad unless you are only receiving one item per week...

Cowboy Neal delivers my mail

Add one or two zeroes to the end of these counts.

Personal mail not so much, maybe 10-20 a year (which is still annoying as I have lived at my house for like 8 years now, but I am getting mail for two different people who haven't lived there in 10+ years)...

However I also through work send out a big mailing process to thousands of clients. It clearly states where to return the forms in the letter, which no one reads (which varies depending on where you live, which is why I can't just use that as the return address). A ton of clients simply return it to the return address on the envelope, which of course is totally incorrect. I have tried asking our vendor to remove any return address, but apparently Canada Post won't deliver it then. Sigh, so I am subject to dealing with hundreds of returned letters personally, sorting them, and re-sending them to regional offices, because no one can take the time to read 2 sentences, even though I send them the stupid thing every year.

Pushing to go electronic, and can't wait, but it is more complicated than it sounds (or at least it is where I work).

... and the neighbors' mail still finds its way into my mailbox a few times a month. The boxes are well marked with names and addresses. We have one of those clustered boxes with a dozen individual boxes in one unit. The post office applied the names (so its not an issue of poor handwriting). Our names are not similar (think 'Smith', 'Chandrasekhar ' and 'Vesco'). And still, they can't get it right.

Very little problem with receiving someone else's mail, so I voted 1-10. Closer to the 1 end of the scale.

But, a bigger problem is items mailed to me that never arrived.

Historically, that number has been zero. But in the last month, I have had three separate items that were sent but never showed up. Mailed about a week apart, from three different senders. Percentage-wise, three missing items is plenty, as my (junk-mail-adjusted) received mail volume probably only amounts to about 10 items per month.

A neighbor down the street is apparently being wed because we get their wedding RSVPs. The RSVP postcards are in a fancy script and the Post Office routinely misinterprets a "1" for a "4". This has definitely made this year's count spike.

But, for the previous residents of my house. They must have been some interesting characters. Lots of collections stuff continued to arrive and some total information awareness database finally associated my home phone number with the address as well, so I was getting upwards of 5 calls a day from collections agencies for them. And, they were complete dicks when I'd tell them they had the wrong phone number and address. At one point, my CELL phone number started getting calls for them, but that only happened a few times.

The worst thing about the whole ordeal is that it turned me into an asshole whenever I get calls for merchants. I got so many calls, I got into the habit of just cussing out any of the collectors or anyone using a collector's con to figure out who lived at my number. That eventually bled over to any merchants who called.

My father passed away three years ago. Apparently he had been donating money to various Republican causes (why I have no idea, he was a Federal employee all his life and was living on a generous Federal pension).

Well these guys apparently don't check the dead person list. Ever. Since I was executor of his estate I got ALL of the Republican mail. I'd write on it stuff like 'return to sender, addressee deceased'. Made no difference.

I'm more or less an independent. But now I cringe every time I get Republican mail.

I get 3-4 pieces of mail per week addressed to
Resident
(but the number and street etc are correct)

We have never had any 'resident's living here.
My Father-in-law is now a resident at the veterans home.

(I work at a long term elderly care facility that has about 100 residents)

Programmers should know better, most of what is discussed in this thread is 'mis-addressed' not 'mis-delivered', as far as I'm concerned mis-delivered is when something gets delivered to an address that is not on the post.

Post going to the address written on it = correctly delivered.

This [google.com] and this [google.com] look handy for your unwanted mail needs, or the guy on every ex-gf's/ex-wife's list for junk mail.

Misdelivered mail has led to two at least somewhat humorous, and oddly related, incidents in my life.

Back in college I subscribed to several IEEE journals. The journals were shipped wrapped in a plain brown wrapper. On one occasion a journal was misdelivered to another college student a few apartments down. The next day he hand delivered it to my apartment, with the wrapper missing, and the comment "That was so not what I thought it would be, dude." You see, adult magazines were usually wrapped in the same manner as IEEE journals.

Skip forward several years, and one day I get some sort of unexpected periodical in the mail, and rip open the dark blue plastic wrapping not having any idea what it was. Nor, for that matter, checking the address label. Mere moments later I found out something about my neighbors life I most certainly didn't want to know. Feigned ignorance being the better part of valor, I threw the magazine in the trash, not wanting to confront the awkwardness of delivering the magazine in person.