Mail at the registered office: what really happens to it

Two rivers of mail

Mail reaches a registered office in two distinct streams, and they are handled under two distinct duties. The first stream is the legal one: service of process and official state correspondence — tax notices, filing deadlines, regulatory letters. Receiving and forwarding this stream is the agent's statutory reason to exist. The second stream is everything else that finds the address — vendor catalogues, solicitation, the occasional misdirected invoice. How an agent treats the second stream is a service policy, not a legal duty, and it is where the fees hide.

What commercial agents typically do

• Official mail — scanned and uploaded, usually fast; the original followed by post on request or by default.
• Ordinary mail — counted against a piece or page allowance in many plans; overages billed per item; physical forwarding billed plus postage.
• Junk — discarded, ideally by policy you can read; some offices scan everything, which sounds thorough until the overage invoice explains the difference.
• Packages — many registered offices decline them outright; a registered office is a legal post, not a loading dock. Companies that receive goods belong on a mailing solution, not an agent's counter.

The questions that price the stream

Before hiring, ask how many pieces of mail and how many scanned pages are included, what the overage price is, whether state notices are treated as unlimited (they should be — they are the point), and how long originals are kept before destruction. Ask, too, what happens to your mail the month you cancel: a forwarding tail is a small clause that matters exactly once, completely.

Privacy, briefly

Mail scanned by an agent is mail read by a machine and sometimes by a person. Sensitive correspondence — legal, medical, financial — should be routed to addresses you control, not to the public post. The registered office's address belongs on filings; your life belongs elsewhere. Keep the streams separate, as Entry 03 insists, and the mail policy becomes a minor negotiation instead of a standing exposure.