Redirecting post

How long is courteous to redirect NZ Post to prior owners/tenants?

We have been in this house for 5 months now and the previous owners receive a prolific amount of post. I was forwarding everything on but as of now I'm returning to sender. It's obvious the previous owners aren't changing their address and are happy to rely on JessDub post. Grrr.

Or should I still be forwarding?!

Return to sender. We moved 5 months ago and changed all our addresses, just started getting mail addressed to the previous occupants and I'll be doing return to sender. If I can change my addresses then so can they, just lazy not to.

we still get mail very occasionally for the lady who used to live here. maybe like twice a year.
she died in 2007.
we write on it:
"return to sender
this person is deceased"

we once got a letter back from the bank of all people, addressed to "the new occupants" saying thank you for letting us know, we will remove her account from our systems. Due to family not getting in contact upon her death they did not know and asked if we had contact details for her family so they can collect her money

I think 5 months is more than enough. Next time it happens to us I'll be done after 2 months. We forwarded mail to the previous owners of this house for about a year so they had 12 chances to get their act together and change their address (for the monthly bills etc). Now we return to sender with a big red RETURN TO SENDER, NOT AT THIS ADDRESS, GONE 2 YEARS, but even that's a PITA when companies won't change the address in their database and we get the same mail repeatedly.

Is it illegal to just dump incorrectly addressed mail if they won't update their details? Cos thats what I'm tempted to do now. I'm sick of having to keep a drawer spare for their mail until we take a load to the post shop.

IMO It depends on what the mail is. I know when I have moved I have had NZPost redirect for the time they do. Three months I think and tried to get everything changed which are regulars but you always miss something and then at time like Christmas or birthdays when you get the odd piece of mail from someone you haven't had mail from for a while and they haven't updated their details. The ones that always worry me are the unsolicited ones you occasionally get from finance or credit card companies whiich might go to an old address and someone might use them.

At our place (we were there nearly 5 years) we used to get lots of mail for several of the previous occupants. If it was clearly "junk mail" I used to chuck it, if it looked official (like from a bank etc) I would return to sender, but to be honest I only did that if I remembered or if it suited me.