[quote=pabloesqobar]I can understand everyone’s anger, but it appears somewhat misplaced. I’m sure 8bit’s heart was in the right place – but he likely just committed a federal offense. No biggee, since there isn’t a bunch of mailbox police roaming around. Not a risk I would’ve taken, tho.[/quote]
A federal offense? It’s a federal offense now to add mail to someone’s mailbox? That’s a new one on me. Mailboxes are protected by federal law, and crimes against them and the mail they contain are considered a federal offense. But in this case I did not open, destroy, or interfere with the tenant’s mail, or vandalize their mailbox. I added a printout of publicly available information, which the tenant most certainly would be interested in receiving, unlike the junk mail which generally fills mailboxes (and is often delivered unaddressed, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.) If adding a flyer is “tampering”, then I definitely need to start going after all the local restaurants.
“What if the tenant is a deadbeat?” Um, then the landlord can use the normal rules to evict them?
@ Uneven – if you found out that the landlord for one of your friends was attempting to sell their house and deliberately not informing your friend (in fact, requesting that prospective buyers not inform them), you would not tell them? If not, I am glad I’m not your friend. If you would tell them, what are the criteria for deciding whether or not somebody is worth gifting with your knowledge?
The landlord wasn’t doing anything illegal, and I certainly didn’t imply that to the tenants. If your implication is that informing people of a public fact is interfering with the legal right to do business, perhaps you are also against Consumer Reports, and any website which does reviews of products. After all, if the website informs people that a product sucks, they might not buy it.
In the spirit of fairness, please do feel free to call the real estate agent and tell them I informed the tenants. It would be a delight to be sued for something like that, and I promise to post all the juicy details to the forums.
