How do I stop post piling up at French second home?

Reader Question: Does La Poste offer a service similar to Royal Mail’s Keepsafe to prevent post piling up at our home while we are not there?

La Poste does offer a garde du courrier service, in which mail is kept at a local post office, but it is mostly aimed at people going on holiday and has a two-month limit. It costs €32.

A similar service also exists called poste restante (for up to three months), but in this case each item you later retrieve from the post office incurs a charge (another solution is to pay for a PO box - boîte postale - which gives you a BP address that mail can be sent to instead of your home). 

You can also pay to have mail redirected, including internationally. 

Called réexpédition temporaire internationale, the service costs €56 for periods of 15 days to a month, €125 for six months, and €202 for six months to a year. 

The contracts cannot be automatically renewed; you must start again if you want to have mail forwarded for a second time.

Deliveries by La Poste, including packages of up to 2kg, not containing goods, are forwarded to the address outside France that you give when you sign up. 

Not included is mail delivered by Chronopost, items left at your house by other transporters, items with a customs declaration or junk mail.

The latter can be avoided by signing up to the Stop Pub initiative, in which a sticker placed on your letterbox makes clear that you do not wish to receive advertising. 

You can download a paper version for free to print and manually tape on. 

Alternatively, buy a sticker version for a couple of euros from a number of shops or on websites such as Amazon.

There is also La Poste’s abonnement mobilité package, for those who are frequently away from their property, allowing you to switch between temporary mail forwarding (but not international) and garde du courrier as many times as you like for up to a year for €102.

France is increasingly going paperless, which means many official letters, statements and bills can now be sent by email and the chances of post piling up are much less than they used to be.

You could ask your postman to ensure any mail is pushed fully into the letterbox to hide the fact the house is empty. 

You could also ask a neighbour to collect your post, although they might be reluctant to do so, especially if the letters are ‘official’.