I once received a letter addressed to: Dotan, Sarid, Israel

That letter crossed the Atlantic ocean, the European continent, and found my one-room lodging slightly over 10,000 KM away. I like to think that this is some kind of record character count vs distance in modern times.

Though this might be the most impressive feat of decyphering a letter, translating handwritten kio-8r displayed as latin-1: http://mottr.am/2012/09/18/letter-to-russia/

Some years ago while living & working in South Asia, I tried this with a letter to my family back in England, writing the address in Devanagari script. (Another time, also tried it with Urdu.) The UK post office managed to decipher and deliver them just fine.

That was probably many years ago.

One of the doubtful benefits of tax-financed government monopolies.

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To clarify I am not a die-hard neo-liberal (in the original meaning). I am Swedish after all.

Just that the team that had the hobby to be mail-detectives, could instead have been employed by the government as nurses or caregivers.

Or even improved the package delivery services in the postal service (very much needed).

The reason for these departments is to maintain the secrecy of correspondence ("brevhemlighet"). This department is the only one within the postal service that has the right to open mail and try to decode who is the recipient. The rebuse or other shenanigans is not the majority of letters, but unreadable handwriting, wet or in other ways damaged so the recipient cannot reliably be established.

Opening mail to preserve secrecy of correspondence sounds rather counter-intuitive.

Why not just shred them?