which is mildly surprising because they have a pretty damned good record as far as I can tell based on personal experience.
This started when I didn't get my ordered cards from 2 QSL managers, one in Italy, the other in Croatia. After almost 3 months I reported to both of these managers I had not gotten their cards and both of them sent them to me again.
The Croatian's card arrived 26 days later which is about right based on the formula according to Piccolo. The formula is you Google how long it should take to get a letter from somewhere and take the larger number in the estimate and multiply by 3 and that's about right.
Example: Google says 7-10 days to arrive from someplace . Take the 10x3=30 so the 26 days is about right. It's in the 21-30 allotted days.
The second card from Italy didn't arrive so after about 45 days I sent both an email and I emailed him telling him I was going to try the Old School method and to expect a yellow envelope containing my card, a pink SAE and 3 USD. He emailed back telling me he would be on the lookout for it.
Two or three weeks later I got an email telling me he had gotten the envelope and had mailed me my card in the pink SAE.
Needless to say, the second card arrived two days later having taken over 62 days to work its way through the system. FWIW I think the pink envelope will arrive here in record time. Murphy's Law. (I think Murphy was an optimist)
My guess is that the first cards both the Croatian and the Italian sent were either lost in their respective mails or through the international postal system sent to someplace like Tonga or Lhasa, Mongolia but who knows.
So much for that.
Both of these QSL managers mentioned an increase in the return of undeliverable cards to the United States which interested me. I was wondering why as I do work Europe and collect QSL cards. Not all of mine have come home.
Why?
The tiny handful I have missed I can easily write off as being just plain lost in the mail and/or dishonesty on the part of the ham which is rare. The ham world is small and the dishonest hams get brought to the public.
QSL managers report an increase in returned to sender cards and I have managed to figure out why. They showed me pictures of a couple of redacted letters showing me the town, country and zip code. The overwhelming bulk of these were people using the standard 5 digit zip codes. Only a couple of them had the full 9 digit zip. ALL of them had USPS return to sender stickers.
That tells me that the problem lies with the USPS and it would not surprise me that they are caught at a sorter as they enter the country that rejects them without giving the local PO the opportunity to try and deliver them.
Typical government trying to do things at the highest level. They don't give credit to the local post office or the actual mailmen that have been doing the job for years.
If they send this mail to the local grass roots people I bet a lot of these could easily be delivered with little or no ado.
My advice would be to use all 9 digits when asking for something overseas.
One other thing, periodically check with the PO for your actual 9 digit zip. Every so often the last four digits change depending if they change the route or not.
As for QSL managers, they should start insisting on having QSL requests use the entire 9 digits. While I don't think it will eliminate the problem it should minimize it.
One thing all Americans can do to improve their odds on making sure the mail gets to where it has to go is to use their full 9 digit Zip code.
I don't know USPS procedure but my best guess is that when overseas mail first arrives in the States it goes through a sorter of some sort and the sorter spits out what it thinks is undeliverable mail and sends it back to where it came from.
Incidentally the fact that an American return to sender on these letters speak loud. It says the overseas post office has done its job. The error is the fault of the US Postal Service that should be doing a better job.
ETA a word from M0URX, a UK QSL manager.
I can also add a few words to this. Letters are no longer sorted by humans. All letters are now sorted by machines.
So if the address is not formatted correctly or the handwriting is not good then the item is rejected and sent to the returns pile. DIXIE sticks a yellow sticker on the item saying letter cannot be forwarded.
It is then returned to sender. So most of the returns are because of automation.
Our OQRS was designed to format address correctly and since we did that in 2016 we saw a big drop in returns from USA.
There are two UK QSL managers I have ordered confirmation cards from, M0OXC and M0URX and both of them seem to have a far better than average track record of mailing cards to the States.
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Maybe I should explain what a QSL manager is.
First, a QSL card is a postcard sized certificate that serves as proof of contact. A ham desiring confirmation of contact generally sends the other ham his QSL card made out with the pertinent contact information along with either an SASE (for stateside contacts) or an SAE and return postage.
A QSL manager is someone hired by a ham to basically do his paperwork. This pretty much means mail out his QSL cards.
There are a number of reasons for this. The ham overseas may have a mail theft problem at his post office. He may simply have lousy postal service to begin with. In the case of one place it's $11 USD to simply mail a letter which makes a simple QSL cost prohibitive.
The ham may just plain be too busy to keep up with requests which is somewhat common in rare DX areas. The other thing that comes to mind are DXpeditions that make thousands and thousands of QSOs and are overwhelmed by the total volume.
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