I’m curious about this. I was just writing down the address of someone who lives in Ma’ale Adumim, the large Jerusalem suburb just over the Green Line in the West Bank. Mail delivery there is surely handled by the Israeli postal service. If someone in Ma’ale Adumim received a letter from a left-leaning American relative who addressed it to:
59 Whatever Street
Ma’ale Adumim 98411
PALESTINE
would it get delivered? I suspect the answer is yes, but I’m wondering if anyone has any concrete information.
Or, for instance, if two letters were addressed to a resident of Northern Ireland in the 1950’s, one ending in “UK” and one ending in “IRELAND,” would both have gotten delivered?
I’m also interested in any other examples you might be able to bring up if you know how this works elsewhere.
Please note that I am NOT interested in a debate about how these territories should properly be classified; I’m just looking for some factual information about mail delivery.
It may depend… in the sense that if the USPS realized that they need to send the letter to Israel in the first place, the Israeli Postal Service will almost certainly deliver it
Not to spill over into debate, but if you want to make a political statement and get your letter delivered more reliably, you could possibly try writing to
XX Whatever Street
Ma’ale Adumim 12345
ISRAELI-OCCUPIED WEST BANK (or something similar), just to avoid the initial problem of getting the letter to Tel Aviv to begin with (rather than to Amman or Ramallah.)
I really, really doubt that you’d run into trouble once the letter got into the hands of the IPS. For one thing, it would be routed to the mail-person’s bag mechanically by zip-code, since you put it on; and the mail delivery person may well never even notice anything beyond the name and the street address when making their round…
That’s a real zip-code in Ma’ale Adumim, in the OP, BTW – you might want a mod to clear that up!
Don’t know about in Israel but this would have been delivered without the postman even blinking.
If it had been addressed “Republic of Ireland” then I’m sure it still would have been delivered but may have taken longer as it may have gone to Dublin rather than Belfast in the first instance and then needed to be passed from the Irish postal service to Royal Mail. Depending on the postman’s allegience it would have either got a chuckle or rolled eyes. I guess there’s a chance that a unionist postman may have spitefully “lost” it but I think that would have been pretty unlikely.
A N.Irish catholic armed services colleague of mine during the “Troubles” was resigned to only receiving some of his christmas post.
He explained to me that at xmas the post office took on a lot of temps to help sort the mail including many catholics who would on seeing a service address destroy or throw away the card or letter.
I don’t know if this is true from my own knowledge but thats what he told me.
I imagine most contested areas do not have home delivery, but rather a PO box system where people pick up their mail from the post office. Home delivery is pretty rare in the world.
I can believe that. I don’t receive some of my Christmas post and I live in London, temps can be pretty unreliable.
I bet some permanent postmen would have been tempted to do the same but if they did it regularly they’d be caught and potentially sacked (or more likely moved to another route).
Actually, they’re not all that **in-**accurate, either. Do the math – 7 million people, over 100000 zips, gives you about one zip for every 70 people. Fewer than that in terms of residences (families.) Throw in non-residential addresses and maybe it’s 100 addresses per zip code.
Just as a point to ponder – the code the OP gives, along with the house number, allowed me to identify the street name (and therefore the building) as well, within 5 minutes.
Not necessarily too accurate, but I thought I’d point it out in case the OP wants to rethink
Definitely not the case for (at least the larger places in) contested areas controlled by Israel (note my PC-ness! :p); I’d be amazed if this were ever the case for Belfast, either…
But if the contested area (as the two examples given here so far) is part of a bigger area where home delivery is the standard, why would people not expect home delivery?
I’ve had problems with packages sent to my home due to mere bilingualism… the package was adressed using my street’s name in one language, the map they were using showed the other language for that particular fragment. As Noone Special said, often the problem isn’t “the locals”, it’s the people further out. People who know they’re dealing with multiple local languages / sending post from abroad to a place whose name may not be recognized by foreigners / dealing with language-related futzy politics tend to “over address”: I’ve seen letters whose province (country) line stated
Navarra/Nafarroa (Spain/España/L’Espagne)
that’s four languages in a single line (Spanish, Basque, English and French).
I suppose it depends where; does anyone know people get their mail in Kashmir?
Interesting; for the record, the “59” was a random number and not the actual house number of the person I was writing to. But still, a fair point. Would a mod adjust this, please?
This gets to the point, I think, which is that delivery is generally in the hands of individual mail sorters and carriers, and not in the hands of the national government. I wonder if there are any countries in which there’s a national policy (official or unofficial) about this.
I just had a look at the international mail section of the Royal Mail’s website. It looks like the only countries that you can’t currently send mail to at all are Haiti (since the earthquake) and Somalia (since the general descent into chaos in 1991). For Iraq, you can only send personally addressed airmail, and some services (e.g. parcels) are suspended for other countries too, e.g. Liberia and Afghanistan.
I tend to doubt this. At least in the US Postal system, ‘temp’ employees are watched much more carefully than the regular ones, and such actions would be caught quickly. (For example, where would they throw it away? The Post Office does not provide trash barrels in their sorting rooms. And they carefully track the number of incoming letters vs. outgoing letters (mainly to count the efficiency of individual workers, and this post office as a whole).
About delivery, there is an international convention that controls mail transmitted across national borders. Most of it’s regulations relate to matching classes of mail, different postage rates between countries, etc. But they also work on ways to transmit mail between unfriendly countries, even those with actual declared wars between them.
Family members have told me that even during the midst of WWII, they could send letters to their relatives in Germany, and even get replies eventually. There was quite a bit of delay. They told me they thought the delay was because the US FBI opened & read the letters, and then in Germany the Gestapo also opened & read them. They did mention that both sides of the family kept the contents non-controversial: things like “Grandma’s arthritis is getting worse, but she still gets around some” and “the crops were good this year”.
How would the USPS get mail to the postal service of the DPRK, for example? Are there be agreements regarding postage in place between us and the DPRK? International mail delivery is founded upon the coöperation of all parties, and the DPRK is not coöperative in very many ways with much of the outside world.
The Universal Postal Union is a UN agency (successor to the 1800’s International Postal Union) that all members of the UN belong to, as well as other non-UN countries & territories (like the Vatican). It handles both the physical arrangements for transporting international mail, and the financial arrangements regarding postage for such mail.
For countries that don’t have direct communications, like the USA and North Korea, the mail is routed through a third country that does have communications with both. For North Korea, I believe this is either China or Japan.
During WWII, mail between the USA & Germany went via either Switzerland or Sweden, I believe.
The letters would be safe enough in the sorting office, it’s when they give a bunch of letters to an individual to deliver that letters can get “lost”. The only way this can be spotted is if enough people expecting deliver of letters complain when they don’t arrive.
