The delivery person has my number, because it's on my order / courier waybill. They typically phone me. I have a fence, so my door is not accessible from the street for a knock.
I have a postbox at my local post office. My official mailing address points there. My tax authorty and (and all other governmental or official correspondence for that matter) is sent via email. I get almost no paper mail these days, and most of what I do get is junk.
"real address" is a misnomer. There's a difference between who you pay your taxes to, and who delivers your mail. These are two different things, and when delivering mail, the latter is the one that matters.
I'd be happy to get my mail delivered, period. Just yesterday my neighbors dropped off two more items that were addressed to me but had been delivered to them by USPS.
FYI if you remove the mailbox from your residence, the USPS will silently return every attempted delivery to the sender.
You can then get a PO BOX, setup your important things like property taxes/dmv/utilities/banks with it as the mailing address, and carry on supplying your residence as your physical address to whoever appropriately asks without even lying.
Most places are just assuming your physical address receives mail and send unsolicited spam to it. Critical services must support a mailing address distinct from a residence address, as it's common for those living at the end of a dirt road without mail service; a perfectly legal way to live.
I currently do this, and my PO BOX receives practically zero mail, and I must say it's a glorious signal:noise ratio.
There are some frustrations though, some places do refuse to send to a PO BOX, and some shippers which claim to use FedEx or UPS will then go on to use USPS and your purchase doesn't arrive. Non-USPS deliveries will still arrive at the physical address without a mailbox, but USPS deliveries will not - those must go to the PO BOX. YMMV
Most (all?) P.O. Boxes in the US have unique zip+4 addresses so you should, in theory, be able to send a letter to:
12345-6789
(assuming that actually corresponded to a P.O. Box) and have it delivered.
With automation, you might even be able to just put the bar code for a letter on the envelope and have it delivered. I say this based on the fact that I used to stamp mail for previous inhabitants with a not at this address and black out the address (but not the bar code), dump it in the mailbox and then have it show up in the email I get daily from the post office showing the day’s mail (fortunately, the human step of delivery usually pulled those letters out of the process).
My home address is in the UK, but I live in a flat and my neighbours are mail stealing...
Are you sure it's your neighbors? We get mail theft here (in Silicon Valley) all the time; thieves harvesting mail for valuables, credit cards, tax data, etc. for ID theft.
In my city, police will not respond even if there is theft in progress and they have idle units at Starbucks next door, claiming that there is no state law against mail theft -- it's up to the USPS to deal with it.
I have a PO Box for everything but junk mail. The much-maligned USPS has a really nice feature nowadays: you can sign a (free) agreement allowing them to accept packages on your behalf from other carriers... so I have FedEx, UPS, etc. all going to my PO Box, using the street-address format for the Post Office proper. It's much less expensive than private services like the UPS Store and such.
Your neighbors are probably more focused on stealing your newspaper. Or spouse.
This is why I pay for a USPS box every year without batting an eyelid. They also provide a physical address for vendors that demand that, presumably because they exclusively use UPS or Fedex - works fine.
I haven't received physical mail where I live in 15 years. I have all my paper bills sent to paytrust, who scans them, and then pays them per automated rules (or allows me to manually approve.) Physical Mail just goes to 650 Castro Street in Mountain View, where I get a re-mail once a month wherever I am in the world.
I lived in an apartment for about 18 months, but never asked for a key to my mailbox as there really was no reason for me to open it.
The only packages I ever need to receive at my place of residence are via FedEx/UPS.
This is incorrect; you can indeed get Informed Delivery for [at least some] P O Boxes, postal employees don't know how to do it, but if you change the address on your Credit Card to be the P O Box, and then try authenticating using that card, it passes fine. That's what I did for my own P O Box, for example (it failed the first time when my card was using my street address).
The mailbox? On your property? that you paid for an installed (or bought off the previous owner), is government/usps property and they'll steal a parcel that someone else has delivered to it?
I am just speculating but if they don't provide door to door delivery then you probably have to upload whatever documents they need defined by law. This clears them and it doesn't matter that they are sending stuff to a mail forwarder as now you are committing a crime.
Sounds like the postal service picks up your mail from your own mailbox? That's completely different from the situation in NL. Here, we post our outgoing mail in big red mailboxes that exist solely for that purpose, but anyone can put stuff in your mailbox, which is usually in your door, so mail arrives on your doormat.
The postal service won't deliver mail to your mailbox or just packages to your door? I can see they see a difference but if they deliver mail to your box then I fail to see why they would refuse a package to your door.
No address? That doesn't happen - is it still the post office delivering unmarked mail? That would be illegal here since only the USPS can legally use mailboxes.
I have a postbox at my local post office. My official mailing address points there. My tax authorty and (and all other governmental or official correspondence for that matter) is sent via email. I get almost no paper mail these days, and most of what I do get is junk.
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