Keith Bowdery was furious when he found out his pals were having to traipse off to collection points and pay £1.16 to pick up the cards he had sent them.

The postal service refused to deliver the cards because they were 5mm too big. But the 71-year-old from Coniston Road, Gunthorpe, Peterborough, said he had even asked at his local post office in Werrington Green to check if the cards measured up.

Mr Bowdery said: “I posted about 50 Christmas cards, but then my friends started ringing me up saying they’d had to go and pick the cards up. I was so humiliated and embarrassed.

“I’ve been ringing my friends and telling them not to bother going to collect the cards, I’ll bring round another one myself. It is disgusting, the cards are only 5mm too big, it’s a cat’s whisker. Talk about Scrooge of Christmas. I had even gone into my local post office because I’d seen this happening to people on the television, so asked if the cards would be OK.

“She told me they would so I thought no more about it.”

Mr Bowdery said one of his friends had to make a 20-mile round trip to pick up the card.

He said: “One friend rang me up furious because he thought he was going to pick up a parcel. It’s not fair on them. I’ll never send out Christmas cards again.”

The £1.16 includes a £1 handling fee by the Post Office.

A Post Office Ltd spokesman said: “The office in question has templates on its counter for customers to measure their items and the subpostmistress has said they always try to make sure customers have the right advice.

“We always take a common-sense approach to the tiny fraction of mail with underpaid postage as surcharging doesn’t cover our handling costs, loses us money and is the last thing we want to do.

“However, the onus is on the sender to pay the correct postage. When items are underpaid, they have to be processed manually, which delays the mail by a day.

“The customer is charged the underpayment plus a handling fee of £1 if they wish to receive the item.”