We really appreciate your help with this, but as @Chieusa said, the fact that one item has arrived does not prove a route is necessarily working as it may only work sometimes, whenever there’s availability, and not work the rest of the time. Even in your list you are saying that the routes work and yet, some don’t have flights to leave the country.
Moreover, the destinations for which registered mail work are not necessarily the same for which regular mail (not registered) does work. Many countries provide different availability lists for each mail type (registered vs not registered).
Ultimately, we need China Post to provide us with the official information. If there’s no page with a list of unavailable destinations, then the next best thing is their postage calculator because it clearly says if a destination is not available and that is likely the information that post offices will use to accept/refuse postcards (note: I’m not talking about registered mail here).
If at least one of them work, then that is enough to consider it available, so there’s no need to check if the others methods are available for the same route (one is enough).
I have to say the “postage calcuator” of the China Post Website do not have any connection with the China Post available destination. I will be very disappointed If you change the postal monitor according to that “postage calcuator” China Post can not send to countries like Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Bolivia, Eswatini, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Trinidad and Tobago, Korea (North). But theses countries can all be shown the shipping cost with the “postage calcuator” of the China Post Website.
like pictures above, 3 ordinary letters: Korea (North), Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago are suspended【邮路阻断=Blocking of postal route】But all these 3 countries can be shown the shipping cost on China Post Website.
I can confirm China Post can send postcards to
Albania, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cuba, Georgia, Iceland, Moldova, Mongolia,Nepal
In China, All the postcards can be handled with Registered Service, If it can be sent via registered way, it also can be sent via ordinary way. There is no difference (Except tracking service) between Registered Postcards and Ordinary Postcards in China. Thank you.
It will be a pity if you cannot believe me. All the information above I have confirmed via sending registered mail or postcards by myself or phoning the worker in BeiJing International Mail Processing Center [UPU IMPC code: CNBJSA].
To check the online postage calculator was a recommendation by China Post to a postcrosser in China who contacted them about this. I’m afraid this is the closest to an official source that China Post provides at the moment.
Sorry, but we really need an official source to update the Postal Monitor.
Testing routes with registered letters is not an effective way to handle this, nor Postcrossing can realistically test this by sending mail from China to all possible destinations.
Even when a registered letter arrives, it doesn’t prove that that route is currently working for postcards. For one, registered letters usually take different policies than regular mail by postal operators at the destination, not just at the origin. Also, a single item arriving doesn’t mean the route is working regularly as sometimes mail to unavailable destinations stays on hold indefinitely, but may be occasionally fulfilled when a one-time-only transport occurs. Lastly, by the time a test letter arrives, the situation for the route may already have changed as it can take months to arrive.
China Post did publish the information for a few months, so we hope they do that again soon as that would be very helpful for postcrossers in China to prevent lost/withheld mail. Until then, the postage calculator is the closest we have.
I am sorry, but this postage calculator only use to check the price (Even the destination country is suspended, the postage can be still calculated) If you do not believe me, please ask some Chinese people to send POSTCARDS to COUNTRIES like Venezuela, Bolivia，Trinidad and Tobago，Sudan，Brunei，Papua New Guinea, Yemen. All the postage of these countries can be calculated on CHINA POST Website, But I confirm that they would all be refused to export by international mail center.
There is no any suspended information about POSTCARDS and LETTERS.
The Old List should be changed.
I will send ordinary unregistered letter next 3 months to all the countries in PC list. I will collect all the suspended country information (In China, if the destination country suspended, the international mail processing centre will return the item back to sender), and send to PC administrators to help to change the list in Post Monitor.
Before I do this, maybe the list of CHINA in Post Monitor can open to all country. 【but I do swear that China post has some suspended countries for ORDINARY MAILS, I know some of them, but no all】
Thank you for trying to help us, but you do not need to send letters for testing.
I don’t think Postcrossing will ask members to send postcards to test postal routes.
Because…
we need to make sure postcards can be sent
from all parts of China (not only the near-by places a person lives)
at any time, consistently (not just the time/day/week a person sends a postcard) and arrive in a timely manner
to an ordinary residential address (except for some post offices that do not make home deliveries)
Yes, we are aware that the official webpage now shows express mail suspensions only. And we are trying to find an ordinary mail suspension list from China Post.
This is my part-time job【Postal Route Researcher】. I have sent a total of more than 1000 international letters from Northern, Southern and Central China, and have made certain contact with the staff of Beijing international mail processing center. I can provide relevant information for reference.The main export processing centers of China Post for international letters are Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing. I am very familiar with these three processing centers.
At present, it is impossible for China Post to provide users with a list of countries that cannot be reached.
For remote small countries (such as some African countries and Latin American countries), relevant mails have to be exported from Beijing【Only Beijing has the right to export for some small remote countries】, and the mails for this region will be sent to the Beijing international mail processing center first (no matter where you send them), so the postal route test is very necessary for these small countries.
In addition, in China, the postal route of registered postcards is the same as that of ordinary postcards. All countries that can send postcards to can apply for registration service without any other restrictions, and only pay 16 RMB more. I don’t know what the situation is in other countries, but that’s the case in China.
Israel Post suggested (via private message from their Facebook page), in case I have questions about inactive postal routes, to check the situation of single countries/territories at this link on their webpage - link that was already discovered to keep the Postal Monitor updated.
So I did check, because I want to be as accurate as possible in my reports, and I have updates.
Can you tell us more about why you say this? Until recently China Post published that list.
I don’t have a reason to doubt the route may be the same, but the availability of the service on the destination may be different.
For example some countries may be (temporarily) unable to delivered registered mail as they can’t collect signature/proof of delivery (eg: due pandemic restrictions), but that doesn’t mean regular mail (without contact) like postcards can’t be delivered.
Likewise, some countries treat registered mail as more important than postcards, and may give it priority on delivery: if they seriously lack resources (delivery people), they may prioritise registered mail, not postcards. Unfortunately postal operators come in all sizes, and sometimes smaller ones don’t always work as we expect them to.
In any case, testing routes by sending mail to all destinations not only is not practical, it won’t work for the purposes of the Postal Monitor as we need an official source.
China Post does not have this service for almost 30 months. [Only published once at the beginning of 2020, and even though some countries have resumed relevant services, the list has never changed until they deleted it recently.]
During this period of time, I have asked CHINA POST many times to give their customers a suspended country list. But they told me that they can’t provide because everyday the postal route changed. As a result, China Post won’t publish any list about suspended countries for postcards and letters. I also deeply regret about this.
【Take Bosnia and Herzegovina, Liechtenstein and Montenegro as examples, China Post resumed the Surface Mail service to these countries Since May, 2022. Before this time, any service is suspended. China Post has not made any announcement about this [Whether suspended or resumed]. Many of my friends failed to send postcards to Bosnia and Herzegovina before May, 2022. But ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’ did not show on any suspended country list of CHINA POST before May, 2022.】
I know the postal route of China Post very well. If you don’t want to believe me, I can’t help it.
At last, I have to stress again that it is impossible to get this suspended country list from China Post officially.
Just as an apropos: if a country can send to Norway they can also send to Svalbard and Jan Mayen. Both are considered Norwegian and have Norwegian postal codes, and all mail will be sent there via the mainland.
12.07.2022
Bulgarian Post informs its customers that, starting from July 12, 2022, the acceptance of all types of shipments to Russia and Belarus has been resumed https://www.bgpost.bg/bg/messages/3406
I agree with you. In China, if someone wants to send mails to Svalbard & Jan Mayen, they just need to write the destination country name as ‘Norway’. The situation is the same for territories of other countries. ‘June060310’s posts about China’ is some mistakes of CHINA POST postage calculator.
Since ~August 2021 had a list of unavailable destinations published at https://www.ems.com.cn/hotspotDetails which (we, and other Chinese members) understood as valid information for letter post items (not EMS). This was the list we have been referring to since then and has been mentioned as source on the Postal Monitor. I don’t know how accurate or up to date the list was, but it was an official source which is what we need. Unfortunately, around early last month that page was down for some time and when it returned, the list only referred to EMS.
As we are now lacking an updated (official) source, and the information on the postage calculator does not seem reliable, we will soon remove all blocks from the the Postal Monitor for China as we no longer have a way to keep it up to date with official information. We will probably do this next week if there’s no developments from China Post until then.
I don’t doubt they tell you that, but I don’t know why they say that, as availability of mail delivery at the destination changes frequently for other countries too, and they still provide a list of available/not available.
From the top 30 countries in Postcrossing (by number of members), only two countries don’t provide (at least some) information about unavailable destinations: one is China Post, and the other is Ukraine which is in war and needs to rely on several neighbouring postal operators to process all their international mail, so it’s complicated to get a unified list.
For sure, availability of destinations change. Some more frequently than others, but a vast majority of them is stable and rarely changes and so can be listed as working (or not working). Most large postal operators do this, but we don’t know why China Post doesn’t publish this list. But, we still hope they will publish it as it helps them avoid stranded/lost mail which can only help them and their clients.
suggested (via private message from their Facebook page), in case I have questions about inactive postal routes, to check the situation of single countries/territories at