Odd shapes and colours adding to postal problems

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://www.connexionfrance.com/index.p ... l-problems" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Strangely-shaped and coloured and badly-addressed envelopes are partly to blame for later arrivals of Christmas mail from the UK in France, says La Poste.

Following admissions by Royal Mail that they have had issues getting mail to France on time due to weather conditions in the UK, La Poste has told Connexion there have also been problems in France.

However a spokeswoman said this is because “every year there is a large increase in the volume of mail from the UK at the year end, and in most cases these letters cannot be automatically processed by our machines”.

She added: “Some are very small, some are highly-coloured; we even got ones made of wood [La Poste sent the image accompanying this article as an example of British envelopes].

“In other cases the post codes are not completed properly: we saw many of them with numbers missing from them.

“Added to that we can tell some letters had taken their time in the UK, because some envelopes we dealt with recently had dates on them such as December 14 or 18.”

Meanwhile Royal Mail said it may be possible to claim compensation for late mail. A spokeswoman said people may visit this link for more information (the link suggests that compensation typically consists of six first class UK stamps).

She advised contacting their customer services teams if you have any queries about your mail via http://www.royalmail.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;, via Twitter @RoyalMail or on 00 44 (0)3457 740740.

[fishtank]

Added to that we can tell some letters had taken their time in the UK, because some envelopes we dealt with recently had dates on them such as December 14 or 18.”

Something went wrong with the cards this year and nobody is fessing up to it but one thing is for sure it had nothing to do with the weather. We were hammered with cards from the 27th December right through to the 30th and they were mostly dated 14th-18th December so they should have easily made it. Something reeks of screw up.

[Celgar]

There was one week in the lead-up to Christmas when the snow fell and we effectively lost two days delivery time. But we smashed it and by or before the Saturday the backlog and everything else had been delivered. I agree with you though in that the major letter/card delays were nothing to do with wooden letters, red envelopes, or even the bad weather. For various/numerous reasons probably including amount of mail and staff shortages a decision was made to concentrate on clearing packets and parcels. Any letters with incomplete addresses or any letters that could not go through the machines were put to one side to sort after Christmas. After Christmas our MC alone had seventy yorks full of this mail waiting to be sorted.