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There are lots of ways for communications to go astray. On the digital side these often involve drop-offs and gopher holes in the network supporting the medium. My fellow Direct staffer Ken Magill is probably tired of writing about the problems of maneuvering e-mail through deliverability thickets. On the Web, where communication is as much pull as push, the debate continues over whether real customers are at the back end of all those ad clicks.

I don't think I'm being sensitive when I say that direct mailers have sometimes been a bit smug in their attitude toward these digital difficulties. The view I've sometimes encountered from traditional DMers has been that while their messages may not have been acted upon or even read, at least there was little doubt they got through.

But inspirational slogans about rain, snow and the dark of night aside, is anyone holding a yardstick to the U.S. Postal Service?

In March, I conducted a little homegrown postal experiment using my own mailbox as a test bed. I'd just come through a holiday season in which I got an inordinate number of catalogs and mailings intended for my neighbors, and I wanted some empirical evidence about the accuracy rate of our men and women in blue-gray.

During the month, I received 136 pieces of mail, including letters, bills, magazines, catalogs, and direct mail of all types, from car-wash coupons and “Have You Seen Me?” fliers to those tabloid-sized collections of coupons that are now showing up three times a week. (I should add that I've been at my current address for almost five years.)

Of those 136 items, 17 were misdelivered. Some went to the right address but the wrong street; others were dropped on the right street but got the street number wrong, occasionally by four or five blocks.

Seventeen misses out of 136 in one month. That's one incorrect delivery every other day, for a 12.5% miss percentage. At a liberal estimate, that's a failure rate of one in 10 tries.

Getting mail delivery right 87.5% of the time over a month doesn't strike me as a record a direct mailer would want to live with.

I'm not even counting the five items I got during the month that were addressed to my upstairs and downstairs neighbors — although I probably should. We're getting pretty used to leaving mail intended for one another on top of the mailbox in the open foyer. This is risky in these days of identity theft, since the mail is just as likely to be bills or credit card statements as coupons or magazines.

But let's face it. When your mail goes wrong one in 10 times, you can't be sure that the post you did receive wasn't detoured into some neighbor's mailbox first. So our informal redelivery system seems an acceptable risk.

I'd write this off as anecdotal evidence, except that other people in my hometown are experiencing the same problems. In the middle of my March study, the USPS Chicago District admitted that overnight mail delivery in my town ranks as worst in the nation, with a 91% on-time rate between June and September of last year. That compares with 95% in New York and Los Angeles, and 96% in Boston.

During that period, 77% of Chicago postal customers rated the quality of their service as excellent, very good or good. The nationwide average was 92%.

Also in March, a group of residents and businesses in one of the city's most troubled postal districts met to complain to postal authorities.

You got it: That's my neighborhood, where even the alderman's personal mail arrives two weeks late, tied in a bundle and tossed onto his stoop.