Forwarding Mail

When professors or faculty members leave the University, what happens to their mail? If they fill out a Change of Address card for the US Postal Service, it will be returned to Yale with a sticker saying the department must forward mail.  The US Postal Service will not forward mail for an individual Yale person.  Since many colleges still allow students to have mail sent directly to them, these two steps apply to student mail as well.

We recommend the following two steps:

1. When a person leaves your department, print up a sheet of labels reading "FORWARD TO:" and giving the new address. Place a sticker over the old address, leaving only the person's name showing. Cross off all bar codes and associated numbers, front and back, with a thick black marker. Put this in your outgoing US mail. 
   
   NOTE: The Post Office will forward UNOPENED first class mail to anywhere in the world without requiring additional postage. However, if you want to forward magazine subscriptions, they would require regular first-class postage to be applied before they can be forwarded. If you have a letter that has first class postage already on it, it will be forwarded without additional postage.
   
2. Advise the departing person that mail will be forwarded for only a set amount of time, such as three or six months. This gives them time to notify correspondents of their new address.  After that time the mail will be returned to sender as no longer here (USE THE JUNK MAIL PROGRAM FOR THIS). This puts the responsibility on the person to change their address and relieves your department of the responsibility of forwarding mail for an indefinite number of years.

Taking these two steps will reduce the amount of unwanted mail coming to your department.