The horrific italian postal service

I have shipped PCBs to Italy quite more than once.
all arrived. registered letters work well - to any country.

most problems I have had by now is:
france (takes very long)
USA (I have had a few coming back with "wrong address", but at least packages come back after 6 months)
all registered letters, no lost by now.

main problem: I can only send registered letters up to 2KG

Same with cash.  Asian buyers almost always sent me cash via registered letter.  Never lost a single one, out of probably 50 or more. 

I shipped a package to Pacemaker in france in May 09, came back in June sometime almost as if a truck ran over the box. Luckily nothing was damaged, he paid to redo it agin. About 2 weeks later, I'm getting frantic emails from him and he was very concerned that it was again on it's way back, and if anyone could help it would be me (according to what the French postman told him). I couldn't call immediately( at work), and told him I would call overseas and talk with him after I got off the phone with the USPS in a couple hours, when I could call. He finally gets ahold of the office where the package was last know to be, and they admitted to never tying to deliver and returning the first package and they were about to return the second attempt without trying to deliver.

Besides this, I had a T4B missing from a package sent from Greg (dripelectronics). He shipped it with a Dripopto V2 pcb and the package was ripped with a tear long enough to get my arm into, lucky I just didn't get the envelope.

I also had a 8 week travel time from Collin in the UK for a couple S800 kits, which is out of the ordinary in todays post.

Kaz

From France to Germany I also experienced unexpected long transfer times, even with registered letters...
Unexpected fast shipping I had from Singapore and Australia to Germany (registered letters), less than a week I thought is impossible, but had this twice.

Kind regards,
Martin