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Comment by cmod | Hacker News Reader

Japan postal service stopped shipping to most of the world last year and are still (I believe) not fully back to world-wide shipping. Supposedly because of JAL contracts and a lack of commercial flights on which they'd usually piggyback.

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I was going to comment about this as well. We've been unable to ship packages from Japan to the US for the past 20 months. I heard that as of yesterday we are now able to ship again, but all custom forms & address labels must be printed rather than hand-written.

Is that for legibility or are they fearful that you might smudge covid-19 onto the labels? (Which is pretty backwards given how rare contact transmission is).

My assumption is legibility, should be a nice cost savings when you don't have to read handwriting.

My guess is that it is because electronic customs info is now mandatory (e.g. US STOP Act), and the printed labels come from a system that can transmit this info.

With handwritten labels the postal service at the shipping end would have to read them and push the data to an electronic system manually.

In Finland handwritten customs labels are still allowed, but you need to register the customs data online since Dec 2020 (or the cleark can do it at the counter).

This is correct: https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/ead/index_en.html

I have had no problem sending packages to the US the last month. You need to use the new online tool to create the label though.

I think that this has mostly been US (and maybe other countries as well?). From experience with me and friends, Europe and Asia has mostly been fine (though sometimes in periods with exceptional delays and a small number of lost/disappeared ones).

Finland had around 70 entries on the list of unreachable countries about a year ago. Haven't checked recently. But I noticed that letters to central Europe which took 2-3 days pre-pandemic, nowdays regularly take close to 2 weeks.

Back in March 2020 the Posti allowlist was 32 countries, the rest were suspended. The list was gradually expanded with more countries (with 64 allowed countries in Oct 2020), and the allowlist was replaced with a list of unreachable countries early this year.

Currently (https://www.posti.fi/en/customer-support/sending/country-inf...) there are 20 unreachable countries due to COVID-19 (AU and NZ are not among them).

Your experience with letters matches mine, they take 2 weeks to Europe regularly now.

I run a small online shop in Switzerland and from my POV it's only the US. We have lost more than 50% of shippings to the US about a year ago. Typical arrival time was way over a month even thought its quotet at 10 days for light letters.

As we mostly ship letters we just sent to every place, even if they are currently not 'open'. ~95% arrived within 1-2 months or so in those critical places.

No idea what's going on over there. The rest of our shipping just got a few cents more expensive but on average just got faster the last 2 years.

I ship to Switzerland (for one) from the US. Never lost a shipment and delay is about one week. This is including this past year, when other shipments to other countries were delayed (though not lost). Completely understand it may work differently in reverse but just wanted to put a data point out there.

Are these all tracked? Because when I buy something from the us it's always expensive shipping and tracked. Some sellers told me it's necessary so it would actually arrive. (It was mostly art, so I am not sure if this is actually normal).

Tracked letters are like 4-5 times as expensive for me, which doesn't make sense for an average order of like $20 :/

This was First Class International Package service, which is tracked by the customs form number.

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