Knock knock. No one there? If you’re out when we try to deliver your mail and it’s too big to get through your letterbox, or it needs a signature or payment, we’ll leave a ‘We’re holding an item of mail for you’ card at the delivery address. This card gives you the address and opening hours of your local delivery office, so you can pop in and pick up your mail, or you can telephone them and ask for your mail to be redelivered when you’ll be in.

If you can’t pick up your mail, someone else can do it for you - all they need to do is take proof of your identity and address. Otherwise you can ring us up or send the card back to us, letting us know when we can re-deliver your mail. You can also use the card to let us know if you’d like your mail delivered to a different address, or to a local Post Office™ (please note that there’s a 50p charge for re-direction to a local Post Office). We’re here to make sure it gets from our hands safely into yours.

We make every effort to make sure you get your mail, so we keep it for three weeks (or one week if it’s been sent from abroad or by Recorded Signed For™). After that, we have to return it to the person who sent it, if there’s a readable address on the outside. If we have to return anything, we’ll attach a sticker explaining why we couldn’t deliver.

If there’s no return address on the outside, we send mail to the National Returned Letter Centre (or to Portsmouth for Special Delivery mail and packets, and to Belfast for letters). They’ll open the mail and return it if the name and address of the sender is inside, as long as it’s not a newspaper, magazine or advertising.

If there’s no return address inside but the contents are of sentimental, legal or financial value, we’ll hold it for three months. If it’s not claimed within that time, unfortunately we’ll have to dispose of it.

Elsewhere on royalmail.com

Undeliverable mail? Take a look at the other reasons we might not be able to deliver your mail.