Just to add my tale because I need to gripe somewhere... I have found international mail to/from the UK to be quite unreliable over the last few years.
On at least two separate occasions, letters containing sintructions sent from Australia to my bank in the UK have disappeared - I eventually had to send them recorded and tracked before they would arrive. My suspicion is that normal mail 'vanishes' because they are addressed to a bank, so might contain cheques?
Some birthday cards to my father/sister, sent untracked, also disappeared.
Coming the other way, my father-in-law sent an iPod by normal mail to my nephew who was visiting me. If they had mentioned it to me beforehand I would have advised tracking, but nobody did; so I wasn't surprised when it failed to arrive.
I have also been mailing between Australia and Thailand. Never lost anything either way, tracked or not.
Now recently I have been mailing between the UK and Thailand - and my wife's birthday card, sent untracked, has failed to arrive, whereas routing printed matter has all arrived - a failure rate of one in four to date. I use a printed address label, printed in both English and Thai, so it's not be the quality of the addressing.
So the common denominator here is: the UK Royal Mail. While I am willing to believe that an item will get lost in the mail every once in a while, I find it rather suspicious that the items that go astray seem to be the 'valuable' ones: either actual value (declared customs label) or potential value (letters to a bank, thick greeting cards).
Anyway, I've learned my lesson - from now on nothing gets sent without tracking.
