Folks:
We set up mail forwarding from one Boston suburb to another. Mail is taking an extra 2-4 weeks to be delivered. A first-class regular letter postmarked in Ohio January 3, for example, had a yellow forwarding label added with a date of January 18. It arrived some days later at our final destination address.
How is this supposed to work?
In my experience, it takes several weeks before the forwarding becomes effective, but once it starts, it adds no additional time. So your experience would be expected if you filed your forwarding request after mid-December. If they re-sent that package now, you should get it just as fast as if no forwarding was in place.
So ideally, if you wanted to start forwarding as of the New Year, you should put in your request in mid-November with an effective date of Jan 1. This is impractical in most situations.
I can’t find the source right now, but forwarding requests supposed to go into a central computer system, so that if you had moved to California, once you are finally in the system, then an Ohio-sourced letter like this would be routed westward.
It doesn’t. Never rely on mail forwarding, it doesn’t work well and there is always a chance your mail will not be delivered at all. Notify all your correspondents of address change.
It goes from your post office to the forwarding rack and sits there for a day or two. From there it goes to whatever the nearby central facility happens to be and sits on its forwarding racks for a few days or weeks. From there it goes to the forwarding facility and sits on a rack for a few days. A few weeks later, you finally have mail.