A South Dakota mail forwarding service abruptly closed last week and began returning mail to senders before announcing to its customers it was doing so. The company, MyDakotaAddress.com, is owned and operated by Jon Knuths and managed by Terri Lund. We called Ms. Lund, who confirmed the closure.
Many full-time RVers opt for a South Dakota address because of significant tax advantages of establishing a domicile there.
Customers received an email notifying them of the closure, but only after the company was already returning their postal mail, leaving many scrambling on their own to get their mail, medications, passports, tickets, and other important information.
Americas Mailbox, an RVtravel.com supporter, was so busy taking orders from My Dakota Address the past few days that owners Don and Barb Humes were working until midnight to keep up with the influx of new customers. A message on its website says that its staff will work this weekend to help.
If your email address is with My Dakota Address, we urge you to contact Americas Mailbox, which will answer your questions and advise of possible action to reestablish service. The company has established a special page for MyDakotaAddress customers . Or call (605) 718-1234 during business hours.
For several years I have used Earthclass Mail (earthclassmail.com) with an address in Portland Oregon. The service is fabulous: they email a pic of every envelope, can open and scan if you like, can forward anyplace, and can deposit checks if you want. It’s about $30/month. I didn’t use it that much, so I’ve let it go. Found a local place in my town that is much less costly and I can ask them to forward if theres anything in the box. Changing mail addresses is a real pain.
that is pretty wild. We moved our domocile from MT to SD last year. We are escapees members but their mailbox there doesnt qualify for physical presence. AMB however has legal presence. We looked at mydakota, but decided against it for the reason above. Pennington county was a higher tax rate but thats fine, its inly a few dollars yearly. That just sounds aweful that no one was notified until it was done. what a mad scramble. We have had good luck at AMB , Barb is awesome. Good Luck all.
Hi Sally.
You may be confusing taxes here. You see, the tax on vehicles is only 4% on the NET purchase. It is the same statewide.
The state sales tax on everything EXCEPT vehicles in South Dakota is 4.5% and various counties and municipalities can add up to 2% making it 6.5%. And of course, South Dakota doesn’t have the yearly personal property taxes that many other states have.
Then, there is the county Wheel Tax which MyDakotaAddress (Lake County) had. That tax added $5 per wheel (not to exceed $60) to the vehicle registration to every vehicle. Our county (Pennington) has no such tax so our members don’t have to pay that tax.
Americas Mailbox is the ONLY mail forwarding company that is in a county that doesn’t have that tax.
Don
Americas Mailbox
yeah, no i thought Pennington had the wheel tax, and had it at a higher tax rate. Wow, cool. thanks for that update. In any case, it was very reasonable to move from MT to SD, we lost our permanent registration leaving MT but the yearly is low in SD. our 1996 F350 ran us 79$ this year, and our 37ft 2004 5th wheel ran us 104$ out the door this year. AMB had worked out great for us in any case.
The post office is working with folks and there are other companies in South Dakota also helping. Are you pushing Americas Mailbox because they advertise here?
Barbara. Absolutely not. I push Americas Mailbox because they are the best by a long shot. If they did not advertise I would be just as supportive.
We had just signed up for the service a month prior to the sudden closure… Wish someone would have let us know that we were tossing away our prepaid yearly fee and the one hundred dollars for future mailing costs. We have filed a complaint with the South Dakota State’s Attorney General. Though we have almost no expectations of a refund, we feel it is important to register with and report on the circumstances to the state officials.
They have owed me postage money for 18 months, keep saying they sent it.
I’ll bet it was due to being unable to meet the competition’s service. It’s pretty darned hard to meet the level of service that Don and Barb at America’s Mailbox deliver especially for the price. When a business is losing customers instead of gaining them they need to either raise the level of service or lower their prices. If they are unable to do that then they are going to “go under”. Between the Escapee’s Club’s mail service in Texas and America’s Mailbox in South Dakota the competition is at a very high level of service these days.
We happened to be in SD when we heard about MyDakotaAddress stopping operations.so after driving for hours to rescue what mail was still there I asked Terri and she didn’t want to talk about it but it was very sudden. I finally got the email notice on July 30th. The post office will generally not forward mail from a mail forwarder but they made an exception in this case and you can’t fill out a change of address online; it has to be via the postcards and every member of a family has to fill out a separate one.
Being a smaller town it would not surprise me if the local post office was working with the people who are left high and dry.
Terri has worked hard and Post Office is not returning mail yet. Holding it for 30days to give folks time to fill out forwarding address forms. Be sure to make one out for each person using a box. Don’t mark “Family”.
You can’t forward mail from a PMB. Only from a real individual address.
Members will have to contact ALL thier individual sources of mail and change each one, one at a time. No mass forward mail from PMBs.
I used Escapees Mail Service for about 12 years. They do a bang-up job! Here’s the URL: https://www.escapees.com/mail-service/
Darrel,
Nobody I talked to had any idea. It came out of nowhere.
Yea, it did…….
We loved Terri and the service but, we received an email around the 16th of the month informing us that they would closing their doors at the end of that month and we didn’t read that email until the 17th of the following month. So we were out here for weeks without a legal address unaware. We still had money invested in that service that we never received reimbursement for.
Americas Mailbox was a life saver. Its a bigger less personal feel of a service but great none the less.
Any news on why the sudden closure with so little notice?