And even then it won't all stop. The direct marketers don't care and some financial companies are bound by law to keep sending the letters if they don't have an updated address for the old residents.

After we started doing this we got a couple of letters from the likes of Zurich Ltd addressed "to the householder" explaining that they'd love to stop sending us junk, but they have to, and if we could give them any details about where the old residents might be, that would be great. I wished them luck and told them the best we knew they'd moved abroad, permanently, possibly to Turkey.