KEY POINTS:
NZ Post is refusing to redirect mail to some Auckland apartments, saying the task is too time consuming.
The problem is growing in the city, as more apartments and gated communities are being built without street accessible letterboxes.
Ann Gluckman, a former principal of Nga Tapuwae College in
Mangere (now part of Southern Cross Campus), discovered the problem when she moved from The Pines apartments in Epsom to a retirement village.
"It has caused strife because I'm involved with quite a lot of various organisations and business," she said.
Mrs Gluckman, 79, said she contacted NZ Post four weeks before she moved to get mail redirected.
When she arrived at her new home, a letter from NZ Post informed her the mail redirection was not accepted because she lived at a "collective" address.
Collective addresses included hotels, hostels, rest homes and apartment blocks or gated developments with letterboxes that cannot be accessed by posties from the street.
Mrs Gluckman lived at The Pines for almost 30 years and never knew there would be a problem.
She receives around 40 items of mail a week.
The volume was too much for the caretaker at her former home to readdress and send on, said Mrs Gluckman, so she returns three times a week to pick the mail up.
"The post office could easily extract mail addressed to individuals and forward them on as they do if you live in a standalone house," said Mrs Gluckman.
The discovery followed NZ Post's move in November last year to charge for the redirection service, which had been free for two months for residential customers.
NZ Post spokeswoman Fiona Mayo said mail sent to collective addresses was not eligible for the redirection service because of the way it was sorted.
She said items for redirection were extracted by hand as mail was sorted at the delivery branch.
But because mail for collective addresses was delivered in a single batch of up to several hundred items, there was no redirection service to those addresses.
"[To] go through the redirection process every day, of going through 300 or 400 pieces of mail to redirect mail from one of those residences is just too time consuming."
Ms Mayo said the terms and conditions of the redirection service clearly stated mail from commercial or collective addresses would not be redirected.
She said NZ Post had recognised there was an issue and was working with developers to try to prevent new cases arising.
It was not a problem for apartments with individual letterboxes on the street.