On a damp winter's morning in August, Croxley envelope pcmw1 flopped into a letter box in the Wellington suburb of Karori.
For five days, it had been on the road between its Karori destination and the farm mailbox at Middlemarch where it had first entered the NZ Post mail system.
Pcmw1 was the code name for the last properly addressed envelope to reach its destination of the 155 envelopes posted in an Otago Daily Times test of the national mail carrier's mail carrying system.
It may have taken pcmw1 five days to travel the length of the South Island but at least it did arrive. Seven of the 155 envelopes are still missing - although, to be fair, six of those seven contributed to their own disappearance.
Middlemarch posted theirs in their farm mailbox a day later and a small sample was posted at 10am on the Friday.
Some had the correct address and post code.
Some lacked a post code.
Some had the post code but not the name of the town or city.
Some were FastPost and, just for fun, five had no stamp.
You could say, if it had been a pigeon race then most were fit to fly but some were carrying injuries.
It will come as no surprise that those envelopes with the shortest distance to travel arrived soonest. A stamped letter with the proper address posted to yourself on a Tuesday in Wellington or Dunedin can be expected to arrive the next day. At Lake Hawea though, the journey is likely to take two days.
Our study found that whether the envelope had a post code made no difference to the delivery time. But leave off the name of the town and rely solely on the postcode, and things can go wrong.
One envelope sent from Lake Hawea to Lake Hawea was a casualty here. Lacking the town's name but carrying its post code "9382", the envelope is still missing after 42 days.
Over the long-haul routes between the north and the south there was a good deal of consistency in delivery times but also a consistent inequality.
Properly addressed envelopes sent from Wellington to Dunedin, Hawea and Middlemarch took three days but letters from those places to Wellington took up to five days.
So, does it help the process to add a FastPost sticker and double the postage? From Wellington, the envelope with the FastPost sticker turned the three-day delivery to Dunedin into one day but made no difference to Lake Hawea and Middlemarch.
In reverse, FastPost worked well for Middlemarch, in particular, but Lake Hawea's FastPost letter took four days to Wellington.
Strangely, a FastPost letter sent from a Lake Hawea letter box took two days to reach the Lake Hawea address.
To test how a weekend affected the delivery process, each volunteer sent five letters on Friday morning.
The Wellington volunteer got the letter he addressed to himself back in three days rather than one day and his letters to Dunedin, Hawea and Middlemarch took one extra day.
Of all the 148 letters actually delivered, with both correct and incorrect addresses, a letter from Lake Hawea lacking the name "Wellington" but including its post code was slowest of all. It took nine days.
Perhaps the most surprising result of all was that two of the five unstamped letters sent from around the country to Dunedin arrived with no fuss. The one from Dunedin took one day and the other from Wellington three days.
But, although the five stampless letters were sent with the correct address, the Dunedin recipient was not notified of the three undelivered letters and was not given the option of paying some sort of extra charge.
Of the seven missing letters, only one was correctly addressed. It disappeared on its way from Auckland to Wellington.
Three of the other letters missing in action had a post code but not the name of the destination town and then of course there were the three without stamps.
The response
We sent the results of the study to NZ Post via email and a week later, on schedule, Dunedin Mail Centre leader Murray Rei delivered the corporation's response.
He said NZ Post was committed to delivering FastPost on the next working day between major towns and cities and Standard Post on the next working day within the same urban centre or within three working days to other destinations.
"Our target for the year ended 30 June 2010 was to deliver 96.5% of mail within specification.
"[An] independent audit shows we delivered 96.4% of mail within specification, and 99.9% of all mail within three days of specification. 0.1% was delivered more than three days later than specified.
"Excluding the deliberately flawed items, your findings seem consistent with our audited results."
Mr Rei said NZ Post handled about 850 million mail items a year between nearly 1.9 million addresses.
"The more accurately mail is addressed, the better placed we are to deliver it to the right place, first time and within our delivery time standards.
"Where an item is not correctly addressed it can be subject to delays because it is likely to be diverted from our automated sorting processes and require manual sorting."
Mr Rei said mail that could not be delivered due to an inadequate address was directed to the mail centre from which it originated.
If the intended delivery address could not be determined and if there was no return address it would be sent to the Returned Letter Office in Auckland "where further efforts will be made".
None of the "missing" letters in the study had a return address on the back and Mr Rei considered that affected NZ Post's ability to process them.
Under the Postal Services Act, the office can open a letter to see if the contents can identify the recipient or sender. If they cannot be identified, the letter is held on site for a week and, if unclaimed, it is sent to a document security site and held for a further three months.
"After that time, it is destroyed."
Mr Rei said the return letter office processed about 18,000 mail items a day and records were kept only of those found to contain important documents or items of value. He said the two letters delivered in Dunedin with no stamps should not have been.
"It is a requirement of our terms and conditions that mail must have the correct postage."
In most cases, a letter without a stamp will simply not be delivered and the intended recipient will not be notified the letter even existed.
"For logistical and practical reasons, the option of paying for non- or short-paid mail is available only to Post Office box or private bag holders," Mr Rei said.
In the case of the one correctly addressed letter that was not delivered, Mr Rei said NZ Post could investigate further if required.
"Letters can go missing for a variety of reasons."
Each year, 36 million items are "lodged" at the Dunedin Mail Centre for dispatch to Dunedin and out to the rest of the country and more than 52 million items are received into the centre from the rest of the country.
Mr Rei said there should be no difference in the delivery time of mail posted in the North Island travelling south, or vice-versa.
Central Otago township a special case
Lake Hawea emerged from the study as something of a special case.
For mail delivery purposes, NZ Post does not regard it as a town in its own right and letters intended for Lake Hawea, or Hawea, need not use the name in the address. And the study showed delivery times were consistently longer for Hawea than for other centres in the study.
Mr Rei said that was because of Hawea's remoteness. He explained how the town's delivery system works.
"The clearance time for Lake Hawea mail is 10am.
"It is transported by rural delivery contractor to Wanaka and then goes by courier via Cromwell, arriving in Dunedin around 8.30pm.
"It is processed for distribution around the country and dispatched that same night.
"As the mail arrives in Dunedin at 8.30pm, FastPost from Lake Hawea misses the 7pm flight deadline from Dunedin for that day, so is dispatched around the country the following day.
"Mail, including FastPost, from Dunedin, to Lake Hawea leaves Dunedin at 12.45am, arriving in Cromwell at 4.45am.
"It is then transported by courier to the Wanaka delivery branch (which includes rural delivery), arriving at 6.30am.
"It is then transported by rural delivery contractor to Lake Hawea.
"FastPost from the rest of the country arrives at the Wanaka delivery branch about 7.30am. The RD contractor gathers it all and departs on the delivery run about 9.30am."
Caught out
When examining NZ Post's mail delivery performance, one should be accurate. And, unfortunately, NZ Post found one chink in our study.
Our Auckland volunteer had always thought his business was in the Auckland suburb of Glenfield but, no, he is outside Glenfield by about 100m and in Wairau Valley, North Shore City.
"Is Wairau Valley a suburb?" our bewildered volunteer asked when his suburban confusion was pointed out.
So, while each of the letters to our Auckland volunteer did have the correct name, street address and post code, their delivery time might have been affected by the inaccurate address.
As for anyone similarly confused, New Zealand Post referred us to its website, where addresses can be checked.
