Is there a small label under the address field on a Christmas greeting you received? Especially around Christmas time, many cards and letters are sent to addresses, which may no longer be valid. The labels are added to items where the address has been checked before sending the card out for delivery with a delivery person.
For the majority of Christmas greetings, the address is automatically verified by sorting machines but the labels help with manually sorted items
The majority of Christmas greetings are automatically sorted at our sorting centers in Helsinki, Tampere, Kuopio and Oulu. The machines are very good at identifying items with a missing, incomplete or unclear address during sorting. These items are transferred directly to Posti’s address clarification. The address clarification continues throughout the period leading up to Christmas. Last year, approximately 80,000 Christmas greetings went through Posti’s address clarification.
However, some cards cannot be sorted by a machine, such as if they are hand-made or if they have an uneven surface. Cards like this are manually sorted. In manual sorting, employees are assisted by an automatic system, which prints out a small label. It makes it faster to verify that the recipient’s address is up to date for manually sorted items. The mail recipient has the option to remove the label from the item.
“A correct address is the most important piece of information for mail delivery. It’s what we base our deliveries on. Of course, we do our best to find out the correct address as soon as possible. Machines are a great help, even if they can’t completely eradicate the issue with incomplete addresses. For that reason, a correct, up-to-date address is vital for the timely delivery of items to recipients,” reminds Posti’s Jarmo Ainasoja.
Christmas greetings with an incomplete address sent so late that they won’t make the address clarification on time for Christmas will be processed after Christmas and they will include a different label. Items like this will include a label with the text: “I went through address clarification”.
Tip: You can easily check postal codes as well as the vital Christmas sending dates and instructions on Posti’s online service at posti.fi.
If you know the street address but not the postal code and city/municipality, you can easily find them out on Posti’s online service using the Postal code search function. You can find the key Christmas dates and instructions on Posti’s Christmas site.
