They destroyed my stamps

Oh no! :joy: I understand they were canceling it but they seemed to take special care in obliterating the queen :speak_no_evil:

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Ouch! That hurts to look at :pleading_face:

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My lovely letter from Portugal that arrived today, with a stamp sheet used for postage, that the courier company stuck a whopping big sticker on top of. The told me it would peel off, but nope. It took part of the sheet with it.

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There is one post office in my city where they rip off pretty stamps. This is very sad. The postcard comes damaged and without a stamp (or with a half-torn stamp).

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Iā€™ve never heard of the RM special hand stamp centres. Would you mind please educating me how I might go about routing my mail through one?

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Wow! Thanks for the super helpful and thorough explanation.

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This is a letter from UK.
I was very excited with the queen stamps and then I screamed when I saw what they did to the Queenā€™s face.

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There is a tape over the stamps

:joy:

And look at these stamps. Beautiful mushrooms and trains.
Look what they did to them. Scribble again??? You have that circle cancellation, why did you add scribble :scream:

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they even scribbled the stickerā€¦ what the heā€¦rd!

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Yes, very disappointed. They are the only envelopes Iā€™ve ever received from Czech Republic.

Well this postcard from Austria is quite exact canceled, nice on the edge of the poststamp everything good readable.

However most postcards are canceled in a terrible way!

Here a printer and barcode is printed over the stamp and the cancelation is only 50% visible.

Or these just a blob of ink. USPS is very good in blobs of ink.


However sometimes it is almost nice ā€¦

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some additional stamps were already vanished on arrival, the remaining two were badly damaged

root cause: rough handling on bigger letter and bad glue of the stamps positioned at the very edge of the cover

an the next one:

the beloved star trek stamps :frowning:

tiny but significant faults due to the maschine handling

pictures with address removed by moderator
please cover it for donā€™t making it public

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One of the worst obliterating postmarks in the US last fall was an Energy Awareness cancel with an electrical outlet and plug. Now they need to have a ā€œSave Inkā€ cancel! Iā€™ve seen some stamps that you couldnā€™t make out the design at all. A real shame if the sender is making the effort to select attractive stamps.

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Oh. Normally I just get the stamped over. It usually on the edge of stamp, just enough to deface it, but not enough to ruin it. Idk

Thereā€™s a long thread about this on this stamp forum.

In this thread, I found an excerpt from the UPU requiring pen-cancellation on items that have not been cancelled when they should have beenā€¦

I have read somewhere (possibly somewhere in that thread) that in some places, the posties who are delivering the mail are even told to do this - not just the staff in the sorting centres.

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Well you learn something new,

ā€¦ And what a great shame it is.

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I have often got stamps cancelled with a pen or black marker too. Royalty of course gets doodled overā€¦ :

Maybe someone was in the festive mood as they used a red marker instead of a black one in December:


(For some reason it doesnā€™t look quite as bad).

Worst are maybe the stamps that have been ripped off. I saved this one because it bothers me that I donā€™t know what it was:


It says princess Maā€¦so it must be princess Margaret and I am assuming some object, rather than her portrait. Havenā€™t solved that riddle yet.
(By the way, I donā€™t remove stamps of postcards, so I donā€™t do any destroying of my own. These examples have all been on envelopes sent from UK).

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I think I can help you :smiley:


Centenary of the First World War (1st issue) - 2014
(it was fun to solve your riddle!) :blush:

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Meh, I was about to post the same! :smiley:

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