Mail

[Morgan]

Is anyone having problems with mail getting through to thai we have had two letters go adrift.The wife rang her mother to check if the letters had arrived she said one woman whose husband works in Tiawan went to the post office to post a letter to him the post office would not except the letter also said Thailand were not excepting letters from Tiawan. Due to the sars outbreak. What other countries are on the list. Im a long way from Tiawan in the uk i know but i do remember when the anthrax scare was on we had problems with mail getting through.

Cheers Morgan.

[sevinnow]

Only mail which needs to clear customs is not excepted in Thai (ie box items or larger) letter mail goes straight through the normal clearing system.

Sev :cool:

[Morgan]

Thanks sevinnow must just have been bad luck with our letters will try again.

Cheers Morgan  

[LordHawHaw]

What follows is based on my personal experience, so don't take it as comprehensive.

My view: "luck," good or bad, has nothing to do with it.

1.  If you receive mail from overseas, AND if you live in the general Sukhumwit corridor, the chance that even a regular letter will reach you is about 15 to 25%.  Parcels, journals, magazines, anything that looks as if it MIGHT contain something interesting or possibly valuable have no real chance of survival.  Unless you do some sort of a test -- which I have -- you won't know about letters you never got, so you may believe that you are having better "luck" than you actually are.  The facts are grim, and probably worse than you realize.

2.  Mail from within Thailand has a better chance of reaching those who live in the Sukhumwit corridor than does mail from overseas.

3.  Wherever you live, journals and magazines are highly unlikely to get to you from overseas.  Maledicta, a journal I enjoy, has stopped shipping to Thailand because of the high losses.  

4.  Asking overseas correspondents to register letters is a total waste of money.  Their chances of getting through are no better: this "everyone who passes it on must sign for it, therefore it won't be stolen" line is just that, a line.  Don't believe it.

5.  Wherever you live, it is a bad idea to try to send small items out of the country in an envelope.  I don't know about parcels, but a friend shipped a lot of stuff via DHL from Bangkok to an overseas destination, and it worked beautifully.  UPS, by the way, will deliver letters within Bangkok, but outside that area, it puts them in the regular Thai postal system and they take their chances.    

My experience with outgoing mail from Bangkok is limited -- but it seems irrational to expect that letters headed overseas are not subject to hasty inspection by the thieves.  I had good results with ordinary letters mailed from a northeastern province, and equally good results when I lived outside the Sukhumwit area -- BUT, and here is the important qualifier, any hint that the letter contained more than a couple of sheets of paper put the message at serious risk.

I have no information about the reliability of the EMS service.

Overall: for letters -- simple, ordinary letters -- I think your chances of getting them out of Thailand and of receiving them from overseas depend mostly on where you are located.    

Your mileage may vary.  

I tell friends overseas NOT to send me snail mail.  E-mail is the best (if not the only!) way for them to contact me, IMHO.

[aitch]

I have sent 6 letters (general mail) to friends that I had made in Phuket. Nothing fancy. 3 made it.

I sent 24 postcards from Phuket to the states. 22 made it.

I have been wondering about this myself. Thanks for bringing it up and Thanks for the tips.

[wolf5370]

One small tip that may raise your odds a little.

I used to send lots of letters and documents from the UK to Bangkok via Royal Mail (i.e. normal post). I found that less went missing if I wrote the envelopes in thai. I hand wrote the name and address in Thai, and photocopied it. I then stuck them on to the envelope. I also wrote 'This envelope contains a letter only - nil value' in Thai on the back...and they stopped going missing.

I make the assumption that the theives in the post office think that it was simply personal stuff (Thai to Thai) so not worth anything with.

Worth a try.