USPS postage fail - What happens next?

March 7, 2015 4:51 PM

I thought I mailed a letter to via USPS to Switzerland. I just checked the receipt, and it turns out it went to Swaziland instead.

The mailing address is a Swiss address, but the postage is Swaziland- ian. According to the USPS postage calculator, postage to Switzerland is 10 cents more expensive.

Does anybody have an idea of what might happen? Will a kind postal worker somehow route the letter to Switzerland as indicated by the address, or is my letter taking a long trip and coming back to my return address?

thanks for your input.

posted by ecks to Grab Bag (11 answers total)

Best answer: No idea, though you could get lucky. There's a regular piece of mail that I receive where I live in Australia, which actually has Antarctica as the country.
posted by jedro at 5:10 PM on March 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

On the postage thing, they might just lower its priority. My mother sent a postcard from England to Charlotte NC on September 19th last year, and it arrived earlier this week due to a shortage of postage.

The sticker on the card said it was short of postage and was going to be shifted to an alternative delivery method, or something.

I bet it'll just arrived late, for that reason as well as the address thing; it's unlikely the same address exists in both countries, and postal coding systems differ all over the place. Someone will eyeball it, work out that the address is formed like an existing Swiss address rather than a non-existent ...Swass? address, and send it to Europe.
posted by Sunburnt at 5:43 PM on March 7, 2015

I got my Samoas mixed up once and the letter just disappeared into the ether. Hope you have better luck!
posted by gerryblog at 6:07 PM on March 7, 2015

So you wrote Switzerland in all caps on the envelope and underlined it twice (or similar)? Yes, it will go to Switzerland, maybe via surface mail, ie by sea or maybe it will arrive there postage due or maybe it will be returned to you if someone notices. You did put a return address on it, right?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:40 PM on March 7, 2015

I will ask my friend who is a postmaster, whom I'm seeing tomorrow, but to clarify: did you just put stamps on it with enough postage for Swaziland (and so your receipt says Swaziland but it's just short postage and doesn't say anything on the envelope), or did you put on a post-office-printed mailing label with a delivery bar code on it?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:07 PM on March 7, 2015

Response by poster: I appreciate all you answers. I wrote out return address and mailing address on the envelope; I told the lady it was going to Switzerland, she printed something out (I think with bar code on it) and gave me receipt I didn't check until later.
posted by ecks at 7:11 PM on March 7, 2015

Best answer: If you wrote Switzerland on the envelope you should be good. If you just told the clerk, she miscoded it and you're out of luck.
posted by irisclara at 10:43 PM on March 7, 2015

They may just return it to you. Once at work we sent a letter to Manila, Utah and it went to Manila in the Philippines. The post office returned it as undeliverable, even though it had the right address and postage on it.
posted by interplanetjanet at 8:36 AM on March 8, 2015

Someone once mistakenly wrote my dad's address as being in Swaziland but it eventually wound its way to him in Switzerland. No guarantees, but I think you've got a pretty good chance.
posted by bettafish at 2:04 PM on March 8, 2015

It might find its way there. Once had a package sent from the UK to Washington (WA) that took a detour through Western Australia (also WA). The envelope was worse for wear and it took months, but it did get there eventually.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:01 PM on March 8, 2015

The main sorting desk in Swaziland must get tonnes of misdirected Swiss mail each year. I'm sure it will arrive at its intended destination soon enough.
posted by guy72277 at 8:38 AM on March 9, 2015