Sending and receiving packages in Bulgaria

The postal system is pretty good here.  I suggest getting tracking numbers though, but I did the sane in the US.

I have a slightly higher success rate with receiving mail in BG than I did in the US.

When it comes to parcels, they will either leave a slip in your mailbox or call you to retrieve it at the post office.

This is the exact opposite of my experience in Sofia Bulgaria. The postal service is almost completely useless. Mail never arrives (in fact, most people don't even bother with a mailbox.) You have to guess when a package is going to arrive and periodically, check with local post offices to see if a package arrives. I love living in Bulgaria but sending and receiving a package here is about the worst I've seen in the world. Expensive, private carriers are the only option. I ordered a small item on Amazon UK and it took 3 months for it to arrive.

I live in Bansko, so they probably pay more attention, because of the number of seasonal residents.

On the time - yes, foreign mail does take time.  Anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months.

I live in Sofia and I'm very happy with the postal service - the friendly ladies in our local post office call me whenever I have mail/parcels and nothing has ever gone AWOL so far.  We don't have a mail-box - and in fact live in a "Villa zone", so there's no delivery as such, but the post office is 5 minutes away.

Cheap, ie under the import duty/VAT limit, stuff arrives regularly from China etc  and you stand a good chance of getting more expensive stuff "under the radar" as well.

For goods from the EU, primarily the UK and Germany, we mainly use a forwarding company (www.uktobg.com) who are fast and very efficient (and cheap @ 2leva/kg) but quite a few companies in the UK deliver here very quickly and cheaply (John Lewis, for example).

All in all, we have had no problems with the post or deliveries - the largest shipment we've had weighed over 500kg....

Hi, our experiences are in general good. Parcels do so far always arrive, from friends in Germany as well as from Amazon. We did so far not Need to pay tax when we received them, but sometimes we have to get to the municipal town to pick them up. In any case, there is always a telephone call by the shiping Company about where to pick the goods up or where to meet for the handover.,
Letters are a bit of a different matter. So far, one towards us got lost for sure, it was containing urgent Bank Information. That´s how we know. We used to send letters from the post office in our village, but either the Lady is retired now, or Long term sick. However, there is no Post Service anymore in the village. If there is mail arriving at the village council house, the Mayor distributes them. With delay, but it arrives.
When we send things now, we usually rely on the Post Office in Stara Zagora. We tried once the one in Chirpan, the municipal town, but that mail got lost.