By John Kelly
Friday, March 17, 2006; B03

Printed on the outside of the envelope were these instructions:

"POSTMASTER: DELIVER TO ADDRESSEE ONLY ."

Oh, would that that were possible. You see, the addressee was my mother-in-law, and she's buried in a tiny churchyard in Canada. She passed away in October, but the letter -- a request for a donation from Mothers Against Drunk Driving -- came to our house just last month.

MADD isn't the only outfit that thinks my late mother-in-law lives with us. There's the Alzheimer's Association, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, AARP, the National Trust for Historic Preservation -- all of them (and many more) have changed their mailing lists, replacing my mother-in-law's Bethesda address with our Silver Spring one.

Forget rain, snow or dark of night -- death doesn't seem quite so permanent when you keep getting free address labels and Lillian Vernon catalogues six months after you died.

My wife is handling her mother's estate, so after Kathy died, Ruth went to the post office, presented a death certificate and filled out a form directing that Kathy's mail come to us. Soon we were receiving mail for Kathy that had those yellow forwarding stickers stuck on the outside. Most of these Ruth plastered with a brightly colored sticker of her own: "Deceased, Return to Sender, Remove From Mailing List."

But invariably the next missive we received would have Kathy's name and our address.

It looked to us that rather than delete Kathy, these charities were hoping we might share her charitable impulses. Instead, it just made us angry. We're the ones who should be having trouble dealing with Kathy's absence, not someone at the American Kidney Fund.

What I discovered was this: Even before we'd had a chance to notify these junk-mailers about Kathy's change in status, the U.S. Postal Service had beaten us to the punch. Change of address information is entered into something called the National Change of Address database, or NCOA. Marketers can access the list.

"We do, for a fee, provide the forwarding address to the mailer," said Postal Service spokeswoman Deborah Yackley . "They're paying us to find out where the person is mailing to."

The information isn't cheap -- it's 75 cents per address, 21 cents if the info is provided electronically -- but mailers and marketers obviously think it's worth it.

What I find ironic is that it seems to take forever to get magazines to follow you to your new home. Yet charities have no trouble updating their records.

It's all part of a process intriguingly called "address hygiene." That's where a database of names and addresses is compared with a whole bunch of other data to weed out bad information. That can mean folding in the NCOA info.

One company, Anchor Computing, touts its ability to "suppress in a single pass addresses of all Federal Prisons, State Prisons, County Correctional Facilities and City Jails in the U.S." It just wouldn't do to send the Pottery Barn catalogue to prisoners.

So, what can we do? The Direct Marketing Association maintains something called the Deceased Do Not Contact List. (Get information at http://www.dmaconsumers.org and click on "Remove My Name From Those Lists.") It costs $1 via credit card to register each consumer (or former consumer).

The fee is to create a permanent record of who requested the transaction and to reduce fraud, said the DMA's Stephanie Hendricks .

We've done that. Now we'll just sit back and see if we can rest in peace.

While we're on the subject of mail: Not long ago I received a hand-addressed, stamped envelope. Inside was Jessica Cabell's business card. On the card was written, "Please call me about your account!"

There was no reason for me to think I had an account with Jessica or with her company, Metropolis Funding Inc. I get offers every other day from people wanting to help me refinance my house. But this one was intriguing. My account?

"A lot of times, they'll say it's false advertising or 'I don't have an account with you,' " said Jessica, who said she got my address through public records. "But it weeds through people who have a problem or issues with their mortgage."

What she meant by that is sometimes her card arrives after someone has coincidentally missed a few mortgage payments. The prospect calls her, afraid he's in trouble. He's relieved when Jessica tells him she's not his mortgage company -- but she'd like to be.

As for the "your account" business, what she really means is "Please call me about [possibly, hopefully, setting up] your account."

Sneaky? Jessica doesn't think so: "I'm not forcing anything on you, so there really should not be a problem."

Share your direct marketing horror stories -- or stories of any sort -- during my online chat. It's at 1 p.m. today. Go tohttp://www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.