Russian Post Tools: Support Bot in VK

After being a target of multiple hacker attacks, Russian Post website disabled access to international visitors. This makes life a bit harder for collectors interested in mail items from Russia: tracking registered mail, including mail from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, finding current postal rates, checking mail exchange limitations between Russia and other countries, finding out post office address – you now need to find alternative, unofficial sources and tools for all these things, and hope they are up to date.

Here I want to share a way to get official info without getting a Russian VPN or looking for a person in Russia for help with this: official Russian Post support bot (with fallback to a human) in Russian social website VKonakte (VK).

VK  is Russia’s largest social website, it’s accessible throughout the World, it has English interface available (among 120 other languages), and – importantly – Russian Post has official support channel there.

You interact with the channel via Messages, and by default your answers are answered by a bot – which is great! because answers come quick, and you can ask your questions in English! The answers are returned in Russian, though, which shouldn’t be a big problem with Google Translate and other translation tools available to us today.

So, here’s one-time set up:

1. 1. Create a VK account.
   2. Click Messager in the left-side menu (or messages icon on the bottom of the screen if you are in mobile web version or in mobile app).
   3. Search for “Почта России” (Russian Post)
   4. Ask it a question

Once you start a conversation with it, it will remain in your Messages section (unless you manually delete it). Now you can always come back to VK and ask Russian Post bot to track registered mail, or find an Post Office address to send your prepared mail to for postmarking.

Here is what is looks like:

Russian Post support in VKontakte

Russian Post Bot answering a question about PO address

Russian Post bot provides tracking information about a registered letter from Abkhazia to one of the European countries. Yes, it’s not detailed, but most importantly it shows that it sees this shipment — something many mail tracking websites cannot do for mail from Abkhazia.

It may ask you for a feedback, before you can ask more questions.