buns3000, I agree that getting a second, free express post envelope isn’t really much of a substitute for having the first one delivered on time, as promised. But I have taken Australia Post up on its guarantee twice over the past five years or so and asked for the free one - if only to uphold the principle and force Australia Post to acknowledge that it stuffed up.
You raise a good point there. The “legal trail” side of things is a useful aspect of Registered Mail, especially if you ask the recipient to return the little cardboard acknowledgement of receipt. I have used it myself for such things as formal requests to close accounts and the like. However, I wouldn’t bother to use it for sending a personal item of value. The articles are not tracked in transit, and if one went missing between Sydney and Perth, they wouldn’t even know which state to begin looking in. Even if they knew which building it was in, it’d be a needle in a haystack. The old “Security Post” service (up until about ten years ago) had every item scanned in and out of each sorting facility it transitted. Records were kept, numbers of articles in and out were balanced at the end of the shift, a detailed manifest was included in the bag, and the bags were sent out with a lead seal and signed and countersigned for. They even used to send empty bags! Say for example there were no Security Post articles for the Wagga Wagga region that day, they’d sent out a sealed mail bag with a little paper advice in it “number of atricles: 0”. This was to eliminate the possibility that a bag had been misrouted or otherwise gone missing. You could locate any item in the country within minutes. All that is gone now though.
Sorry, I did sound a bit schoolmarm-ish there, didn’t I? You can actually get away with doing atrocious things to the address, and we usually get it through for you. Consider my favourite ever - a letter arriving ex-China had obviously had the address copied by a person with absolutely no English, and was (from memory) more or less as follows:
Chen’s Chinese Restaurant
Open Seven Days
Eat in or Take Away
No MSG
Tel: 9207 ****
Sydney
I checked it against the telephone directory, and put the correct street address on it. It got there. Similarly, if you were to throw a letter into any pillar box anywhere in Australia with only my first name and the postcode on it, I’d probably get it (sorting centres have their own postcodes).
So what happens if you do something minor like not put the state abbreviation on the address? Well, usually not much. It’ll probably get there on time. However, I indicated above the sometimes vague nature of both human and mechanical sorting, and the more information you include in the address, the better your chances of not having it delayed. If the machine that day happens to be ornery and decides your handwritten ‘3’ looks a bit like a ‘2’, having that ‘VIC’ on there will probably convince it otherwise, In the end it’s up to you. For mine, I’ll happily make the extra few pen strokes.
This is a frequent complaint: “Hey, that was my passport you arseholes! I don’t give a shit about the free envelope”.
Fact is, the service is not infallible. No postal administration in the world can offer that. No private courier can either. There is a reason why they don’t mail nuclear missile launch codes. You have to decide how valuable an item is to you, and if it’s worth the risk of posting. The risk is small, but it’s there. Beyond a certain point, you’d be buying a Virgin Blue ticket and taking it there yourself in your pocket - and for certain things people do just that. Even then you might find yourself at a fogbound airport.
There is no one answer to this. You decide. All I can tell you is that you may rest assured that when Express Post items are delayed or mis-sorted, we get our arses royally kicked.
Also, make sure you always sign the dangerous goods declaration. If you don’t, that sucker ain’t going anywhere within a bull’s roar of an airport. It’ll be chucked on the back of a semi with all the regular mail.
The other thing to mention is the concrete floor test. Stand on a concrete floor, hold the parcel with your arms straight out from your body, and let go. If you’re scared to do that, you probably shouldn’t be posting it. People post cartons of wine in their original box and wonder why bottles get broken. We don’t deliberately beat your mail up, but we can’t treat it with kid gloves either. There is no time for that.
Yes and no. This is another commonly heard comment too. For some areas, what you are saying is true, but the Express Post guaranteed next day delivery network is different to the normal mail. If I send something from Sydney to Parramatta, your point is valid. If I send it to Perth, it is not. You can post an Express Post satchel at 6pm in Sydney, and it’ll be delivered to a Perth CBD address the next morning - you can’t do that with a standard letter. If I send a letter to Armidale, it’ll bounce up the New England Hwy on a truck. It’ll be resorted at Tamworth, and put on another truck, and all that takes a couple of days. If I send an Express Post article to Armidale, it’ll be on a direct SYD-ARM flight that evening. It pays to check the two different networks and work out if it’s worth paying the extra dough for Express. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
And one last thing. Nobody has mentioned this here, but I’m surprised it hasn’t come up (it usually does): WE DON’T X-RAY OR SHINE LIGHTS THROUGH YOUR MAIL TO SEE WHAT’S INSIDE.
I’m not sure where this one comes from, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked about this. We have no interest in what is inside your mail. The only exceptions to this are dangerous goods (in this case Australia Post Corporate Security gets involved and having somebody open an article is a rare big, big deal involving wirtnesses, lots of high level authorisations and the like) and mail entering the country. In the case of mail coming in from overseas, it is put through the same customs and quarantine checks that incoming luggage is. Then it is X-rayed at an Australia Post facility but by a Customs Officer, not a postal employee. If the articles are opened, that will be done by a Customs Officer or an AQS person, with an Australia Post employee present.
Damn, that’s tempting! First name and postcode only? That’s service 
Somehow, I just don’t quite believe that you’d be able to deliver a letter to a Spiros in 3181 or even a Nguyen in 3121 Loaded..
Cheers, TLD.
What you wrote about Express Post envelopes reminds me of something that came up maybe half a dozen times when I was working the mail room - people wanting to send express post letters from Lonsdale Street to Collins Street (ie 3 blocks apart in the CBD). Always seemed a bit pointless to me, but I realised there’s not much benefit in the mail room boy correcting a partner …
I know. I’ve read some amazing stores about mail addressed to:
Martin the greengrocer
The Corso, Manly Not the beach end - the other end
and it actually getting there. Bravo AP!
When I worked there I sorted one from overseas addressed to:
Berkelouws
NSW
Australia.
By coincidence I had for years shopped at Berkelouw’s Book Barn on the Hume Highway outside Berrima. I hope that when they got it they appreciated the lack of address information.
Alot of this stuff is true also for the US postal system. During the time I worked there i constantly found myself amazed at how much actually did get through. More stuff that was woefuly missadressed arived where it was supposed to. Eventualy. As long as there is enough correct information to get it to the right post office it will usualy get where it is should. Every couple of days there would be a letter on the time clock with just a name and the town, letter carriers were supposed to look and see if it was a name they knew, and amazingly, most of that stuff got delivered. The only exception I remember was a letter addressed:
Grandma
Fox Point Towers
Fox Point WI
It might have gotten to grandma if there had been a return address with a name, or if Fox point Towers (not real name of the towers) wasn’t a retirement community of condos with 4 buildings each with 100 odd units. The building number might have helped. As it was it eventualy went to Minneapolis to the dead letter office where they would have opened it to see if anything inside gave us a clue.