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From my experience the French post deals with these just fine. They have to, this issue is quite common. I have regularly received mail with a mangled address b

From my experience the French post deals with these just fine. They have to, this issue is quite common. I have regularly received mail with a mangled address because whoever sent it did not bother to check encoding and some Unicode got printed as something else. Also, if you write the country at the bottom (as you should), they will just send it to wherever that country’s postal services will pick it up without bothering to match whatever’s on top to a local place.

inglor_cz 5y ago
I think the worst mangled address I ever saw was on a package ordered from Italy. The second worst was USA. Unfortunately, my address has a lot of accentuated characters (Ř, Á, Č, Ž).
- kergonath 5y ago
  I have seen a fair bit of those from the US as well (mine had both é and à).
throw0101a 5y ago
> Also, if you write the country at the bottom (as you should), they will just send it to wherever that country’s postal services will pick it up without bothering to match whatever’s on top to a local place. If one is able to design a postal addressing scheme (many just evolve in an ad hoc fashion over time), being able to fail gracefully is a handy feature to have. In Canada, our postal code system was set up in the 1970s, and is reasonably rational: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada If an international shipper can (a) get the package to Canada Post (by writing "Canada" on it), and (b) has the postal code on it, then it can be narrowed down to a fairly small geographic area: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/A1A+1A1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/A1A+1A1 * https://www.google.com/maps/place/M4A+1A1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/M4A+1A1
- kergonath 5y ago
  That is my experience in the U.K. as well, where it sounds similar to your description. And it works very well, it is a very sensible solution.

inglor_cz 5y ago

I think the worst mangled address I ever saw was on a package ordered from Italy. The second worst was USA. Unfortunately, my address has a lot of accentuated characters (Ř, Á, Č, Ž).

kergonath 5y ago
I have seen a fair bit of those from the US as well (mine had both é and à).

throw0101a 5y ago

> Also, if you write the country at the bottom (as you should), they will just send it to wherever that country’s postal services will pick it up without bothering to match whatever’s on top to a local place. If one is able to design a postal addressing scheme (many just evolve in an ad hoc fashion over time), being able to fail gracefully is a handy feature to have. In Canada, our postal code system was set up in the 1970s, and is reasonably rational: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada If an international shipper can (a) get the package to Canada Post (by writing "Canada" on it), and (b) has the postal code on it, then it can be narrowed down to a fairly small geographic area: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/A1A+1A1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/A1A+1A1 * https://www.google.com/maps/place/M4A+1A1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/M4A+1A1

kergonath 5y ago
That is my experience in the U.K. as well, where it sounds similar to your description. And it works very well, it is a very sensible solution.