Hi All

Today I am back with a new problem. Swiss post is not delivering me any letters. All the important letters from the canton are getting returned to them. My letterbox is labelled properly and my address is also correct, so I am not making any of the obvious mistakes. I talked to the post office and the postman, and they give the same response - "If your address is correct, it should arrive."

Now what should I do ? Did you ever face any such problem ?

Ask the cantonal office which has received their letters, returned, to give you a copy of the envelope, if possible, or at least a list of the relevant dates.

Go down to the local post office, with this information, and a photo of your letterbox, showing the correct name, and ask to speak to the person in charge of the distribution. Tell them that you're going to post yourself some more letters, with another "sender" address, to see what will happen. Get a friend to be the "sender".

Before doing that, ask a few of your neighbours if they, too, have missed post.

In the meantime, write a letter to the people whose letters are not getting through, and ask them to please help you to fill in the gaps. Inform them that you are dealing with the Post Office and that it is not yet clear where the problem lies. Ask them to please send you copies of all the letters they've already sent, from a date you specify, again, but this time preferably by mail. Do this in the local official Swiss language.

I have had so many issues like this with Swiss Post, good luck

And while you're at it, check if you've given "the canton" the correct address.

Be sure you reside in the right canton. Not that you actually live in Hergiswil NW.

I've gotten letters with the wrong street, the wrong town, and the wrong canton without problem.

Tom

Yes. Besides the same town name in another canon, there are many Swiss places with similar sounding names, or names spelled almost the same way, and it's worth asking your neighbours whether the place you live has such a "partner" town.

Dietikon and Dietlikon.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Diet...47.4251986!3e2

Dietlikon and Dättlikon.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Diet...47.5250347!3e2

Uerikon and Uetikon.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Ueti...2d47.23666!3e2

And so on.

Another thing to check is the post-code, to see whether perhaps any two digits have inadvertently been transposed.

My son got fined CHF 200 for not handing in his tax return on time. He had never received the documents in the first place. The address was correct on the letterbox and the documents were addressed properly. The Tax office re-sent the documents. They were returned again. This went on three more times, with endless phone calls and emails in between. Any other post was delivered fine. Especially marketing rubbish. The post eventually got it right, but my son never got the 200 back, and eventually dropped the claim because life's too short.
The post office claimed a 'malfunction of the system' but they couldn't explain how the 'system' was able to distinguish between important documents and useless crap.
I suggest a stiff letter sent by registered post to this address
Post CH AG
PostNetz
Contact Center Post
Wankdorfallee
3030 Bern
Tel. +41 (0)848 888 888
Fax +41 (0)844 888 888
www.post.ch
Forget emails and phone calls. It'll bring you nothing. The tax man sent scans of the returned envelopes (with proof that they were addressed correctly) to my son who forwarded them to the post office as evidence that their 'system' was getting a bit too big for its boots. That eventuall did the trick.
They sent an email to apologize and had the audacity to wish him a sunny day. Well, he lives in Wallis, so thanks for nothing.

The Swiss Post maintains an address database of individuals and businesses. Sometimes the database data are incorrect. The OP might wish to inquire at his/ her local Swiss Post office to determine that the name and address in the database are correct.

SRF ran this story on an individual who properly received post under her first name but not under her two first names since the address in the Swiss Post database was not properly linked to the two first names:

https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/prob...e-briefe-nicht

At our previous apartment we had a registered letter returned to the local post office as neither of us was at home to sign for it. It was supposed to be held there until a certain date, but when I went to the PO the following day it had been sent back to a sorting office and we never heard any more. To this day 3 years later we have no idea who the sender was or what the letter was about.

Thank you everyone for their advice. It is most likely a system error on the post side (and not any ambiguities in the address) because I was staying at the same place 6 months before and I had no problems then. Sorry I forgot to mention this point before.

That's an excellent post. Thank you. It must have been a great relief to finally know why some post was delivered perfectly properly, and other items not at all.

It reminded me of another Swiss story. Two people lived in the same town, with exactly the same firstname-and-secondname-and-familyname, but neither knew of the other. Although they both diligently returned mail to the sender which evidently had no connection to them at all, they were also both missing mail. It seemed that "the system" was returning some mail as being not properly addressed.

One day, through some cooincidence not to do with receiving post, they discovered that there were two of them. From then on, by agreement, once a month or more frequently if it seemed urgent, each of them bundled up all the wrongly received mail and walked over to the other's home and put a big envelope in their letterbox.

The odd part for me was that they did this for decades without ever feeling any impulse to meet each other!

That’s how I was sent to the betreibungsamt the one and only time in 10 years. Somehow I didn’t receive the “Mahnung” & they sent back the registered letter early.

Our 'neighbor' (next apartment over) had a bad case of receiving our mail. Including Registered mail!!!

If they weren't kind enough to open the mail, realize it wasn't theirs, and dropped it off at our mailbox - we would never know. Makes me wonder how much mail we are missing.

So finally this issue was resolved. My name did not exist in their internal database. They took 1 month to add it. And also they sent me stamps worth 4 chf as a settlement for the inconvenience.