I'm going to be printing out that statement from OzPost and carrying it in my wallet every time I go to the PO, until things settle down.

The whole 'large letter' and 'written material' thing has been nebulous and unpredictable for nearly as long as I can remember.

If you refer to both the old and the brand new 'post charges booklets, international 'large letters' are defined as 'letters / postcards' and 'documents' not exceeding certain physical characteristics. However I've had some PO eployees state that a book, for example, can't go as a 'large letter' regardless of whether it fits the size/weight criteria, because.... it's a book.  However I've never had a problem with a pamphlet  - even when it has more pages than a very thin book. So apparently, depending on who serves you, a thing is a 'document' as long as it isn't hardcover. Which is clearly ludicrous, since a hard and softcover version could contain exactly the same printed material and both be within the size/weight guidelines.

I've just learned over time which of my local PO staff are more **bleep** about this, and which more liberal, and have literally brought the same item back when someone has gone on break, and had it posted no problems.

If that statement from the OzPost representative quoted above is correct, this should no longer be a problem, nor should it matter if you're mailing completely non-printed matter related material, so long as it it's within the size/weight limits.

I ASSUME this applies to large letters within Australia also, as that would be MOST of my parcel traffic.

As to the new categories for international parcels - I remain to be convinced what's going on here. The new booklet states that a 'standard' rate airmail parcel to New Zealand, up to 2 KG, will take '10+ working days', which is obviously longer than airmail used to be. 'Standard' is given as 6+ business days, which sounds more like the old 'airmail'...

However a parcel up to 500 grams to NZ used to be $10.55.  Now it's a choice between $11.86 for 'economy' and $19.73 for 'standard' - and obviously the difference is even more marked when you're sending things further afield.

When I checked the website however, they had different delivery estimates from the booklet, and different estimates for different countries (which makes sense - but why not mention this in the damn booklet, instead of just '10+' for every country in the world?)

When I rang OzPost information they told me that 'economy' is the new 'airmail', 'standard' is the new 'express', 'express' is the new 'express courier', and I don't know what 'courier' used to be.

However when I rang the local post office to explain this to them (true: they actually asked me to find out for them), they told me that the new 'standard' is the same as the old 'surface air lifted'.  Does anyone else even REMEMBER 'surface air lifted'? That's going back to at least the 90's, if not the 80's! And another employee in the same post office the week before was telling me why they discontinued it in the first place, and why it wouldn't work anymore.

Luckily I don't have much listed at the moment, as I was anticipating going away next week, but I think I'm going to go and cancel overseas delivery on what I do have until such times as I have at least consistent anecdotal evidence about the new delivery times.