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Post by MEintheME on Oct 20, 2014 18:05:12 GMT
Hi, I have seen various posts about Aramex and shop & ship services that people use, but what about "normal" mail? Do you have a mailbox in the compounds for family and friends to be able to send letters etc? If so, how reliable is this? Have people received parcels and/or letters via normal post or is there such a thing? Also, do these get searched by customs? Thanks  |
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derekg
Senior Member
Posts: 107
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Post by derekg on Oct 21, 2014 3:41:12 GMT
There is a mail service available in all communities, with each employee receiving a post office box at either the work or residential location. The PO Box receives mail from the Saudi Post, which is run by the government, and internal Saudi Aramco communication. It is no more or less efficient than other services and is convenient for letters and small packages. Al incoming packages are subject to search by the Saudi Arabian authorities so it is important to ensure that what is sent is consistent with the cultural expectations.
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Post by UmmRiyam on Oct 21, 2014 10:35:23 GMT
My mom sends us packages every few months via USPS, and they arrive safely to our Aramco PO Box.
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Post by oyibo on Oct 21, 2014 11:18:16 GMT
Note that these Aramco PO Boxes are shared with at least one other person, if your GC 14 and below (dunno about others). One of my friends here is not comfortable with having his personal mail sent to a shared PO box so he is looking at the Aramex option. I dont know anything about that either, but just beware if you are the "private" type.
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Maursh
Senior Member
Posts: 169
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Post by Maursh on Oct 22, 2014 6:53:19 GMT
I have had amazon send me DVDs directly without issue.
- they did take three weeks to arrive, but this was expected since that it typically how long regular mail to the UK takes to arrive and send
- the package had been opened and resealed
Also, there are no shared mail boxes in Rakah. The number itself nmight be shared but it is forward from Dhahran to Rakah and physically there is one box per Villa.
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Post by UmmRiyam on Oct 22, 2014 9:06:25 GMT
As far as I know, we're not sharing a PO Box. We are in UDH. Maybe bachelors share? I don't know. But, anyways, if you receive a box, then you have to sign to pick it up because it obviously won't fit inside the tiny PO Box.  |
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Wutz
Senior Member
Posts: 143
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Post by Wutz on Oct 22, 2014 10:49:34 GMT
UmmRiyam,
oyibo's comment applies in Dhahran, where GCs below 14 share mailboxes in Al-Mujamma post boxes (I don't know if the same is true in the Al-Midra post boxes).
Wutz
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Post by bburke73 on Oct 23, 2014 13:25:22 GMT
My wife, Zukhra, and I (Brandon) just arrived to Rakah this past Saay night. Regarding mail, as a previous poster stated, Rakak residents have a single box assigned to them. Rakah residents also receive a Dhahran camp post office box number/address. The Dhahran PO Box is your "physical" address in Saudi Arabia; any inbound mail/packages you wish to receive, this is the address you would furnish the shipper. Once received at the Dhahran camp mail center to your PO BOx there, your mail is automatically forwarded to your Rakah PO box. At least that is how it was explained to me at the Rakah mail center by the postal workers there.
On a side note, my wife and I are using St. Brendan's Isle (SBI), a mail forwarding service in the US, located just south of Jacksonville, Florida. We changed our address with all of our banks and other agencies/companies we belong to (or owe money to) to the new address provided by SBI (we lived in Washington, DC prior to joining Aramco), and now all of our mail is delivered to SBI. SBI will receive your mail, and send you an email notification of what's arrived; you log into their web-based software, and you get to see a scan of the front of your mail items (the envelope, showing who sent the items to you). When you log in, you can choose to have your mail held, the contents scanned so you can read through it, or discarded (they shred everything).
We do most of our billing and other US necessities online, so get very little mail, but the basic service is inexpensive (less than $15/month, though scans of contents get charged per piece). Anyway, our intent is to have our mail and packages forwarded from SBI to KSA once every 3-4 weeks; SBI will consolidate all of our mail/packages into the smallest configuration possible (they remove original packaging and repackage smaller, to save cost/weight), then ship to us when we direct them to using US Postal Service international rates (you will pay for the shipping), which I have found to be generally less expensive than FedEx/UPS/DHL (I've lived abroad from the US previously). With the added feature of receiving a PDF scan of your mail contents, which you can then download to your computer, we don't anticipate much mail heading to KSA, save magazines and important items where we need the originals.
As other posters have stated, vendors like Amazon and others can ship directly to your KSA address (the Dhahran camp PO Box you will be assigned); my wife and I simply found that we prefer having everything going to a US address first, where we receive email confirmation of arrival, then can arrange for forwarding at our leisure and convenience.
Apologies for the long novel, but I spent a lot of time looking at this issue, and we settled on a professional mail forwarding service. As always, each family is different, but this works great for us.
Brandon
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