Auspost self service terminals - a cautionary tale of receipts

A couple of weeks ago I found myself back in Canberra for two or three days, and I had a parcel to post.

Yes, I could have posted it at home where you line up and they weigh your parcel, tell you how much it is, and give you your receipt, but I'd forgotten to go to the post office and it wouldn't wait till I got back.

So I went round to the Woden post shop in Canberra. Last time, about twelve months ago, it had been a fairly conventional Australia Post outlet where you could post parcels, buy stationery, printer ink and SIM cards. However, I found it had moved round the corner and was a larger outlet. What was still the same was the queue of people wanting to lodge parcels and collect registered mail.

And then I spied a self service terminal, the first I'd seen.

So I used it. It was fairly conventional, basically a cross between a supermarket self service checkout and a library self service machine. Basically you weigh your parcel, type in the postcode it's going to, it works out the cost, asks you if you want tracking, and you wave your credit card at it.

It also gives you the option of entering an email address to have a copy of the receipt mailed to you.

All pretty normal.

The receipt never turned up in my mailbox, but we had the paper slip from the machine, and even though we keep them religiously we've never had to use them as we've never have had a problem with parcels going astray.

Of course this time the parcel went astray (actually it hadn't, it had just take an an eccentric route through the Australia Post delivery network - Woden to Sydney via Hobart), and of course when we realised it might have gone AWOL we couldn't find the paper receipt - I suspect we'd accidentally thrown it in the bin along with some parking and restaurant receipts.

So I went looking for the electronic copy. It wasn't in spam, or junk, or even automatically deleted because Thunderbird has taken a dislike to it, and as I've two email addresses, one which is harvested into the other I checked both services via their web clients.

Definitely not there.

And because I buy a lot of books (and other stuff online) I checked my MyPost account in case it was there in my Australia Post Digital mailbox.

Definitely, definitely not there. J, by this time had called Australia Post's helpline, found someone helpful (!) who had traced the transaction from the terminal logs and confirmed that it had got where it was going this morning, albeit with a short sojourn on the Apple Isle.

Remember I said I had two email addresses (actually I've more, but that's another story)  I use.

In the midst of our panic I remembered that sometime ago when I was still working I'd used the other one to set up a second MyPost account  to keep work stuff separate and simplify claiming expenses.

So I logged into my other account for the first time in eighteen months, and yes there was the receipt, sitting in my digital mailbox.

I'm guessing that the self service terminals have a rule that if the email address is associated with a MyPost account they save the docket to the account's digital mailbox rather than emailing it to you.

I can't remember if it terminal asked me to scan my MyPost card or not - I didn't have it with me - before asking for an email address.

The obvious experiment would be to try sending something with a non-MyPost associated account, and see if it emailed you the receipt ...