COLCHESTER and Tendring's postal service remains Britain's second-slowest - with less than 80 per cent of first class mail arriving on time.
Final figures for the last financial year reveal that while strikes resulted in poor performance across the country, only in Stoke-on-Trent was performance worse than in the CO postcode area.
Chelmsford's CM postcode was also in the bottom five.
Colchester posties managed a 3.8 per cent improvement on three months ago, when statistics for the first nine months of 2007/8 showed only the remote Shetland Isles had a worse record.
However, with just 79.6 per cent of mail reaching its destination on the next working day, standards remained well below the regional target of 91.5 per cent.
Royal Mail today blamed last autumn's industrial action for the below-par results.
But Colchester post-staff who contacted the Gazette have claimed another major factor was the staffing cutbacks and altered shift patterns that prompted union members to strike.
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