Mail in the USA...

[Chickaflick 0]

Our home is rural GA and sometimes my fiance tells me mail takes a long time to get to the mailbox. Is it true that having a PO Box for delivery of mail is safer and faster? I've heard conflicting things. We are thinking of getting a PO box for when we start AOS.... but then someone else told me that USCIS gets mail address and home address mixed up....

[Darnell 8,479]

physical delivery - yes, is safer and faster .

as for USCIS blunders - alas - it happens.

[Saddle Bronc 124]

physical delivery - yes, is safer and faster .

as for USCIS blunders - alas - it happens.

Also, USCIS (and NVC) are known to send mails to the last address they have on file (which I found out the hard way in 1999 when I swapped from I-485 to Consular Process for my own GC--and the mails from NVC went to the chopf**k lawyer who had misfiled my labour-cert).

[Kathryn41 3,205]

Make friends with the person who delivers your mail. Go out and talk to him/her when they are doing their rounds and let him/her know that you are expecting important documents from USCIS and ask him/her to keep an eye out for them. That personal touch does help a lot. You could also make an in-person visit to the Post Office that services your area, asking to speak to the Postmaster/mistress and letting them know you are new to the area and wanted to introduce yourself. Tell him/her that you expecting important immigration documents and wanted to give them the 'heads up' that they are coming so they were aware and wouldn't send anything back but would deliver it to you as soon as it arrived. In rural areas this does tend to help somewhat. I do know that I let our postal delivery guy know and he did a great job with an envelope from USCIS that was so badly smeared that more than 3/4s of the address was unreadable - only part of the name, part of the street and the zipcode could be made out if you scrutinized it very closely. He delivered it when he would fully have been within his rights to return it as an undecipherable address. Throughout my process he kept asking me how things were going and actually even asked me about where he should go on a holiday to Canada . So, I would go that route to try and 'grease the wheels' for a better relationship with the postal service people than doing a change of address to a PO Box.

Edited September 17, 2010 by Kathryn41