Special Posts: Lost Postcards - Taiwan

Lost Postcard: US-2540576

Card Mailed on or about: 5 December, 2013

Days Since Sent: 284 days

Sent to: Tainan City, Taiwan

Postcrossing User Sent to: QingHuaCi

"Four Hoosiers"

This card jokingly calls these four donkeys as "Four Hoosiers"

This postcard is lost.  Please check your mailbox.

       Today I begin to cover the sad topic of lost or missing postcards.  In the world of Postcrossings, these are cards which a person sends out but never get registered.  After 60 travel days on any card, Postcrossing will permit you to get a new address so you are not stuck with a series of cards are taking a very long time to get to their destination.

       This week we will have only lost postcards.  Hopefully one day they will be found.

       Lost cards can happen for any number of reasons:

• the various international mail systems "ate"/lost the card
• the user decided to stop participating in Postcrossing and therefore never registered the card
• the sender wrote an incorrect address on the postcard
• it was mismailed to the wrong country (such as being sent from the UK to the US, but getting sent to Sri Lanka!)
• the postal system in the country has been suspended due to natural disasters, war, or political strife
• etc.  

       Even in at least one known case, a postcrossing card sent from the Netherlands was noticed among the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines flight number 17 which was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014.  (In that case, Postcrossing alerted the sender so they could send the card again.)

       I have so far encountered a number of these lost cards.  Hope remains that maybe these cards will turn up at their destination.   Hopefully, one day, I will have a post where I can return to one of these lost cards and announce that they finally have been received and registered.