The post lost it, and this time that is true

Postal networks move enormous volumes and a small fraction of it goes wrong. Items get mis-sorted onto the wrong route. Labels get damaged past reading. Things fall behind machinery and are found months later or never.

This happens. It is the honest version of the most overused excuse in the subject, and that is exactly why it deserves a strict page rather than a sympathetic one.

The test before you accept it

A genuine loss has a beginning. Something entered the system and a third party recorded that it did. If there is no independent record of the item ever being accepted anywhere, this page does not apply and the case is elsewhere.

That is the whole test and it is not negotiable. The distinguishing feature of a real postal loss is that there is evidence of the item existing in the postal system before it stopped existing. Without that evidence, what you have is an item that was never there.

The shape of a real one

• Movement is recorded, and then it stops at a specific point rather than never starting.
• The stopping point is somewhere plausible, like a sorting facility rather than a doorstep.
• The vendor is as puzzled as you are, and their puzzlement is specific rather than general.
• The vendor supplies details you did not ask for, because they have them.

The last point is soft evidence and it is still worth something. Somebody who actually posted an item knows things about it. Somebody who did not talks about postal conditions in the abstract.

Why this attribution is comfortable

Because it accuses nobody. Everybody involved gets to keep their dignity, the loss is nobody fault, and the conversation stays warm. That comfort is precisely why it is offered so often and accepted so quickly.

Comfort is not a reason to reject an explanation. It is a reason to check it, because a comfortable explanation gets less checking than an uncomfortable one, and the difference in scrutiny is where mistakes live.

What follows from getting it right

If it really is this, the honest answer is that nothing follows. There is no habit to change and no failure to learn from. The only useful reaction is not to draw a conclusion about the vendor, because they did not cause it either.

The far more common outcome is that applying the test moves the case somewhere else. That is the actual function of this page. It exists so that the genuine version has a home, which lets every other version be sent back where it belongs.

On rates and the numbers people quote

You will see loss rates quoted with two decimal places. Treat all of them as invented. National postal figures, where they exist at all, measure a different thing from what is being discussed here, and nobody has a reliable number for the specific case.

What can be said honestly is comparative rather than numeric. Items that were definitely posted go missing rarely enough that most people never see it. Items that were claimed to be posted go missing often enough that everybody has a story. That comparison is the useful shape and it does not need a figure attached to it.

This site does not publish invented statistics, so it will not give you one here. Where a judgement is being made, the page says it is a judgement.

• Back to the cases with no author
• The version that is not this
• What you can actually observe