This is not universal. Not absolutely sure about this but my experience is it depends on the individual Post Office whether they do carrier pickup or not. Growing up out in the suburbs of DC we had a traditional “mailbox on a pole” at the end of the driveway and if you put outgoing mail in it and put up the little flag, it would get taken and mailed. When I moved out and into the city, that was no longer the case; we had a mailslot in the door and I would have to walk down to the box on the corner to mail things. My last two residences have been just outside the DC line and the PO here doesn’t pickup either except from the box on the corner. If I stick outgoing mail in my house mailbox, it’s still there the next day with fresh incoming mail on top of it.
Don’t forget our streets are paved with gold and everybody drives a Cadillac.
It’s quite rare I think all around the South to see a neighborhood corner post box - I took a picture of the one I saw in Pittsburgh because it was so weird. Around here (and in Atlanta and every other Southern city I’ve known) pretty much everything from first-ring suburbs and out have boxes on posts by the street. Only old in-town neighborhoods like mine have boxes on the houses (mail slots are vanishingly rare.) And of course they pick up your mail - I didn’t know there were places they didn’t.
i do think it is policy for the carrier to pickup, nationwide. some mailboxes aren’t easily visible as to contents without looking from above and closely. carriers might be placing without looking that closely, they are often at arms length.
My mailbox is on a post at the end of the driveway and since I’m home during the day I just put the outgoing mail in it and raise the red flag on it late in the morning, when I hear the mail truck (it’s deadly quiet here, you can hear the truck start-n-stop, start-n-stop). The mail carrier picks it up in his little truck and stuffs the daily mail in the box. I’ve never worried about anyone stealing our mail (as I’ve said, it’s like a neutron bomb went off during the day around here), but if there is something important to be mailed, or a big check, I will put it in a public mailbox somewhere during the day when I’m out doing errands anyway. … There are severe penalties for stealing mail, and nothing is supposed to go in your mailbox except mail - flyers for lost dogs, or we’ll-paint-your-house, or Avon booklets all are supposed to go in the newspaper box affixed under the mailbox…In the winter sometimes the mailbox is buried under snow (you have to shovel it out, including the road so the truck can reach it) or it might get knocked over by a snowplow. In that case you either have to get a post office box or carve a slot in the snowbank and insert your
mailbox at the proper height for delivery. No mailbox, no mail…Finally, the last comment on mailboxes I will ever share - wasps often think a mailbox is an ideal place to build a paper nest in the summer. Beware.
My parents live in a neighborhood where there is a walking route, the postman delivers the mail to a box mounted by the front door of their house. The mailman will take any outgoing mail from the box.
I currently live in a neighborhood with a driving route. The postman delivers mail to a box out by the street. S/He will take any outgoing mail from the box.
I used to live in a neighborhood with community mailboxes. It is a large subdivided box with locked boxes for about 25 residents. The mailman has the key to the street side. There was a separate box on the side where outgoing mail was deposited.
I used to live in an apartment building. There was a separate little building holding locked mailboxes for all the residents of the building and a separate box for outgoing mail.
I think the trend in this country is away from the walking/driving routes and toward the community mailboxes.
At one time delievery in the city was to the front door and delievery in the country was the mail box on the street.
Around 1974 to allow the postal worker to deliever mail at a less cost the post office required new homes to have mail boxes on the street. Each home owner was allowed to put the box where he wanted as long as the driver could reach it with out getting out. That was followed by grouping 4 mail boxes together. Now they will require a single box with multiple doors for an area both sides of the street.
Thanks for the answers everyone. So if I understand correctly, the curbside boxes are usually found in more sparsely populated areas, where the mailman needs to drive?
I didn’t know that you could put mail in your box to be collected for delivery - I like that idea!
One more thing, I’m confused by this quote from the USPS website linked to above: -
Do the mailmen usually drive on the wrong side of the road?! Why not just have the driver’s seat on the opposite side?
That’s how they do it. The driver’s seat is on the right side of the car.
I would complain to your local Postmaster if your mail is not getting picked up. I’ve never heard of any policy that would allow it to be anything other than mandatory.
I worked as a carrier for the old Post Office. In the city I can tell you that there are many idiosyncratic delivery methods. Sometimes I just left mail inside the screen door. A number of older houses had milk boxes cut into a side wall that the mail could be left in. Almost anything that was a container was used for mail at times. Apartment houses had pull down sets of hinged openings so that I could drop in all the mail into the tops one after the other. We had a special key for this. Some of these were probably technically illegal, but it wasn’t worth anybody’s time and effort to police it.
Being a city boy I had never been to a house that didn’t have walk-up service. Even the inner suburbs lacked curbside boxes. But I was a replacement floater and inevitably one day I got sent out to true suburbia. I was faced with streets full of curbside boxes. With flags. We got essentially zero training and no one had ever told me what to do with the flag.
Being very bright, I analyzed the situation. None of the flags were up. I was there to deliver the mail. Obviously, therefore, I was to raise the flags to indicate that the mail had arrived. So that’s what I did all day.
(I made discreet inquiries at the end of the shift, so that only happened once. I’m sure I was the talk of that neighborhood, though.)
Even in suburban neighborhoods, people tend to watch for strangers around their mailboxes. I heard about more theft in the city. You certainly can buy locking curbside mailboxes if you want.
Suburbia is not dense. Routes are miles long. It would need zillions of carriers to do them on foot. True rural, farm, and backwoods routes are even longer. Houses can be a mile or more off the road. The U.S. is so utterly vast that it always amazes me that it functions.
ETA: Mail trucks indeed do have right hand drive so that they can drive with traffic. It takes a day or so to get used to this but then it seems normal. Back in my day (and apparently in a few scattered places still) carriers used their own cars. This was before bucket seats. You could simply slide over, work the steering with your left hand, and the gas pedal with your left foot, and drive carefully from box to box reaching them through your open right passenger window.
This is exactly as insane as it sounds.
individual curb boxes can be where there are no sidewalks in urban areas (often new constructed areas without sidewalks). though they are mostly rural.
they drive on the correct side (right side in the USA) of the road. some might have ride side steering vehicles. though rural carriers (most i believe) are not actual employees but contractors who use their own vehicles, they sit in the right seat and operate the vehicle from there, ones i’ve seen drive slow and safe.
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ETA: removed now-redundant answer to Kiyoshi.
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Speaking to all the posts above …
Iin addition to the general idea that mailbox practices change depending on rural vs. widespread suburb vsd dense suburb vs city, they also change over time. The USPS is always striving for greater efficiency for them, which usiually translates into slightly more hassle for the customer.
AIUI, mailslots in front doors are no longer permitted in new construction. Single boxes on posts at curbside are now frowned upon, with communal box groups serving 5-100 houses (depending on density) being their current design standard.
But AFAIK, there is no national-scale effort at retrofiting old neighborhoods to new standards, and there’d be a revolution if they tried.
Funny!
On the rare occasion I have been home when the mail carrier has come by, I asked her why she didn’t pick up the outgoing mail, and I was specifically told, without explanation, I needed to put my mail in the box on the corner. At the moment I am in an apartment with one of those little cubbyhole boxes, but they also would not pick up from my last residence which was a house, served by the same Post Office(it was also strange that they didn’t consistently deliver to the same place every day-- sometimes it was in the actual mailbox by the carport that was sort of hidden, other times it was stuck between the front door and the screen- different carriers I suppose). I will look into it now that I am curious.
pickups and slots
http://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/508.htm
3.0 Customer Mail Receptacles
3.1 Basic Information for Customer Mail Receptacles
3.1.1 Authorized Depository
Except as excluded by 3.1.2, every letterbox or other receptacle intended or used for the receipt or delivery of mail on any city delivery route, rural delivery route, highway contract route, or other mail route is designated an authorized depository for mail within the meaning of 18 USC 1702, 1705, 1708, and 1725.
3.1.2 Exclusions
Door slots and nonlockable bins or troughs used with apartment house mailboxes are not letterboxes within the meaning of 18 USC 1725 and are not private mail receptacles for the standards for mailable matter not bearing postage found in or on private mail receptacles. The post or other support is not part of the receptacle.
2.1.6 Door Slot
A door slot for mail must meet specific criteria:
a. The clear rectangular opening in the outside slot plate must be at least 1-1/2 inches wide and 7 inches long.
b. The slot must have a flap, hinged at the top if placed horizontally, or hinged on the side away from the hinge side of the door if placed vertically.
c. When an inside hood is used to provide greater privacy, the hooded portion must not be below the bottom line of the slot in the outside plate if placed horizontally, or beyond the side line of the slot in the outside plate nearest the hinge edge of the door if placed vertically.
d. The hood at its greatest projection must not be less than 2-1/16 inches beyond the inside face of the door.
e. The bottom of the slot must be at least 30 inches above the finished floor line.
When I had lived in Chicago my mailbox was attached to the house, so I had no experience with curbside delivery. The house I bought here had curbside delivery; I knew that the mailcarrier would pick up mail from the box, so I would leave it there. However, I didn’t know about the flag thing, so I never put it up. One day when I went to pick up the mail there was a note inside (actually, I think it was written on one of the envelopes) telling me to put the flag up if I had mail to be picked up.
I do remember that in Chicago the carrier didn’t always pick up mail that I’d left in the box; often I would get home to find something I had left sticking out of the box mixed in with the delivered mail. So I generally just dropped the mail off at one of the many mailboxes I passed on the way to work.
So are the mailboxes actually right outside on the roadside edge of the sidewalk, and not even on the householder’s property? Otherwise how would the mail carrier be able to reach it without getting out of the truck?
It may or may not be on the homeowner’s legal property, depending on where the home is. The mailbox itself, however, is the property of the Federal gov’t, even though you go to Home Depot or wherever and actually purchase and install it.
for individual roadside boxes they are supposed to be 6" from edge of road, this might be on government property (the road easement). if they are in an area with sidewalks this would also be the case, in many areas your property ends at the inside edge of the sidewalk, the outside grass area between the sidewalk and curb is owned by the government.
i don’t think it is owned by the federal government (the Postal Service is technically not part of the government now though it is controlled and given many protections as if it were) now or previously. the box does have to be approved by the Postal Service and there are laws pertaining to it prohibiting unauthorized use or theft from.
To be picky about it, the homeowner owns the box itself, and is responsible for installing and maintaining it to USPS standards. But USPS “owns” the space inside it. It can’t legally be used for anything but mail.