Dead letters are undeliverable mail that cannot be returned to the sender. Postal services have a dead letter office to handle them. Reasons for dead letters include wrong or missing addresses and unclaimed mail. Dead letters are held for varying periods, then destroyed or auctioned off. Postal workers try to preserve privacy and valuable items are found in dead letters. Dead letters have intrigued people since the 1800s and have been featured in movies, books, and TV shows.
A dead letter is a piece of mail that cannot be delivered to the addressee and cannot be returned to the sender. Dead letters are also known as undeliverable mail. Most national postal services have arrangements in place to handle undelivered letters, including a dead letter office where such mail ends up. The postal services have a remarkable talent for delivering mail, but sometimes even the most intrepid postman fails and thousands of dead letters end up passing through post offices every year.
There are a number of reasons why a piece of mail becomes dead letter. If the delivery address is wrong and the postman cannot decipher it, usually a piece of mail is returned to the sender. However, if the sender did not leave an address, misspelled an address, or moved without leaving a forwarding address, the letter becomes a dead letter because there is no one to whom the mail can be delivered. Dead letter also appears when mail and packages are not picked up, such as an abandoned PO Box or general delivery mail that is never picked up.
Once a regional post office determines that a letter cannot be delivered, it attempts to either return it to sender or mail it directly to an undeliverable letter office if there is no way to track it. Correspondence is held for varying periods of time in a dead letter office, depending on regional regulations and the type of correspondence. Once the retention period has expired, the mail is destroyed. Valuables are usually removed so they can be auctioned off.
Since the secrecy of correspondence is believed to be important in many countries, post offices are careful about how they handle dead letters. Postal workers will try as hard as possible to trace the recipient or sender of the letter, but if these efforts fail, they will attempt to preserve the privacy of the sender and recipient by destroying the letter. Surprisingly valuable items are found in the Literary Offices, ranging from stolen artworks to jewelry.
The concept of a dead letter has intrigued many people since the postal services began creating programs to handle undeliverable mail in the 1800s. Dead letters have played a part in an assortment of movies, books and television shows, and the people who they are interested in mail and the history of mail are sometimes fascinated by dead letters. Even Postal Service employees are sometimes interested in the stories behind the dead letters they process.
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