How to set up mail forwarding before going overseas long term

Leaving Australia for a year, two years, or indefinitely? Your physical mail does not stop arriving just because you have left the country. The ATO will still send paper notices. Your super fund will still mail you an annual statement. Your bank will still post replacement cards to the address on file. Medicare, AEC, your strata, your tenant: none of them know you have left, and a surprising amount of important mail still arrives on paper in 2026.

Set up mail forwarding properly before you go and you can manage every piece of mail from anywhere with an internet connection. Skip the setup and you can come back to a year of unopened mail, expired bank cards, missed ATO deadlines and a stale Medicare account.

This guide walks through the seven things to do before you leave. Allow about a week of part-time effort to do it well.

1. Choose your mail handling service

Australia Post offers a redirection service that physically forwards your mail from your old address to a new one. That works when you are moving from one Australian address to another. It is impractical when your new address is in Berlin or Tokyo: redirection internationally is expensive, slow and limited in duration. Australia Post redirection is also limited to a fixed term and your old address eventually expires.

What you actually want for long term overseas living is a virtual mailbox service. You get an Australian street address and PO Box. Your mail arrives there. Someone receives it, scans the envelope, and lets you decide what to do via a web portal: open and scan the contents, forward, shred, store, or return to sender.

HotSnail is one of the longest running virtual mailbox services in Australia. We are based in Sydney and run our own scanning facility. Sign up at members.hotsnail.com.au/signup. The signup process takes about ten minutes and you will get an Australian street address for your mail straight away.

2. Verify your identity

Australian mail handling is regulated. Any reputable service has to verify your identity before they receive mail on your behalf, the same way a bank does. This is a one-time process. HotSnail accepts passport, driver licence or other photo ID via a secure upload in the members portal. Expect to spend ten minutes uploading and waiting for confirmation.

If you are sharing the mailbox with a spouse, partner or child, add them as additional names on your account. Mail addressed to anyone on the additional name list will be associated with your account. Without this, the mail handler is required to return mail addressed to non-listed names.

3. Notify the big four

Once your new address is live, change it with the senders that matter most. In rough order of importance:

• The ATO. Update your postal address via myGov → Australian Taxation Office → My Profile. The ATO still sends some notices by physical mail and they are time critical. The official guidance is at ato.gov.au.
• Medicare. Update via myGov → Medicare → My Details. Medicare still posts physical cards on renewal and they cannot be re-issued without a registered address.
• Your bank. Each bank has its own address-update path, usually inside online banking under Profile or My Details. Replacement cards, secure mail and statutory notices go to your physical address.
• Your super fund. Annual statements, insurance change notices and consolidation correspondence still go on paper for most funds. Update via the fund's member portal.

Knock these four out in your first 48 hours. Everything else can wait a week.

4. Notify the secondary senders

Once the big four are done, work through:

• Your private health insurer
• Your electricity, gas and internet retailers (if you have not closed the accounts already)
• Your accountant and tax agent
• The Australian Electoral Commission
• Any subscriptions still on print (magazines, professional memberships, alumni associations)
• Your strata corporation or body corporate if you own an apartment
• Your real estate agent if you are renting out a property

A typical Australian leaves about 15-25 addresses to update. Keep a spreadsheet and tick them off; you will refer back to it months later when something unexpected still arrives at the old address.

5. Set your default auto-action

In your HotSnail account, set the auto-action that applies to new mail by default. You have two practical choices:

• Scan envelope. When mail arrives, HotSnail photographs the envelope and emails you. You decide per piece whether to open and scan, forward, shred or return to sender. This is the right default if you receive a variety of mail and want to triage each item.
• Open and scan. HotSnail opens every piece and scans the contents as PDF. You see the full document the same day. This is the right default if you receive a lot of statements and want to see them automatically. There is a per-page scanning fee.

You can also set per-sender rules. For example: open and scan everything from the ATO and your bank, scan envelope only for everything else.

6. Decide your storage and shred policy

Decide in advance what happens to physical mail after it is scanned. HotSnail offers free storage for the first 60 days. After that you choose: continue storing for a fee, shred with audit log, return to sender, or batch forward to your overseas address. Most overseas customers shred after scanning, on the basis that the scan is the document of record.

One exception: anything legally significant on paper (passports, birth certificates, original signed contracts, court documents) you usually want forwarded, not shredded. Set a rule: if the sender appears to be a court, government department or legal firm, hold for review.

7. Test the system before you fly

The last and most often skipped step. Two weeks before you leave Australia, ask a friend to mail you a postcard at your new HotSnail address. Watch it arrive, scan in your portal, and try the various actions: download the PDF, request a forward, request a shred. If anything is unclear in the workflow, sort it out while you can still call our support line from the same time zone.

Once you are overseas the workflow becomes routine. Mail arrives, you get an email, you decide what to do, the system does it. The setup takes a week of effort; the payoff is years of being able to live anywhere without losing track of your Australian mail.

For specific overseas destination guides, see our use case for grey nomads, the existing blog posts on forwarding to the USA, and the broader blog for country specific tips.