you write "Return to Sender" on the outside of the envelope and stick it back in the mailbox (really). or, if you live in a complex with a separate outgoing mailbox, then put it there.
Usually I don't send anything back -- but when I have, I've been able to just drop it in a blue mail box vs. going all the way down to the post office; very easy. I've seen people in my building just leave it down by the mailboxes for the carrier, but I have a blue box on my walk to work and drop it in there.
I moved from Austin to Houston almost ten years ago. Was good friends with my Austin mailman, who lived down the block.
About a month after we moved, I got a package in the mail - a cardboard mailing tube, containing a poster, that I'd bought online a couple of years before but never gotten around to putting up. But how did it end up back in the mail?
It turns out that during one of our move trips, the poster was left leaning against the outside wall on the front porch at the Austin house, next to the mailbox.
Our mailman saw it, assumed that it had been (recently) delivered by another postman on his day off, and he knew that we had a forwarding order in place. So he put the poster back in the system with our Houston address on it (being properly packaged and all) and I got it a few days later.
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