American mailboxes

[Pleonast]

In truly rural areas, mail is not delivered at all. Every resident gets a post-office box (at no cost since there’s no alternative) and has to drive to the post office to get their mail.

It makes sending things to them a little tricky. The post office will not deliver to street addresses there; you must use the PO box number. But private deliveries (UPS, FedEx, etc) will not deliver to PO boxes; you must give them the street address. When ordering something online, you can’t always tell what service the store will use. Usually, you can specify both PO box and street number, but some sites use “intelligent” software to check for non-standard addresses. It can be a pain getting those to accept all the necessary information.

[johnpost]

USPS says that a roadside box is to be set back 6" to 8" from the front of the curb or edge of road.

people do place the post 4’ from the road and use a 5’ 4"x4" cantilever horizontally to bring the mailbox front 8" from the road and 41" to 45" height.

[johnpost]

@Pleonast

It makes sending things to them a little tricky. The post office will not deliver to street addresses there; you must use the PO box number. But private deliveries (UPS, FedEx, etc) will not deliver to PO boxes; you must give them the street address.

both UPS and FedEx (there’s is called Smart Post) have a delivery product where the local post office does the delivery, you can have that delivered to a PO Box number. see if the shipper will ship that method if needed.

[butler1850]

@Giles

How is white more visible in the snow?

The old one was black, which is hard to see at night. It also did not have any reflective markings.

As the mailbox is above the normal level of the snow piles, I figured reflective surfaces would be easier to see.

[guizot]

@flodnak

…those mailboxes are found in rural and some suburban areas, not in cities and towns and not in all suburbs. But apparently something about them appeals to Hollywood…

I agree with this. My sense is that originally, when the US population started moving more and more from cities to suburbs, people made a point of putting the mailbox on a post by their gate or by the curb, precisely because they wanted to emulate the rural experience, where houses often are quite a distance from the road. It was a way of being non-urban, a way to accentuate that they no longer lived in the city with its problems. It emblematized their escape from the masses on the street. Sure, at a suburban house it does save the mail carrier some steps, but I really think that people were sacrificing the security of a slot in the locked door for the self-assurance of being separate.

@Snnipe_70E

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….

Yes, but 1974 is long after suburbia sprang up. For so many years the mail carrier of suburbia was happy to walk up to your front door, braving dogs and what not, and yet still suburbia liked the idea of the box on a post at the front picket fence—a sentinel checking entry to the manor.

@yabob

…and the mailbox-on-a-post will become a bit of nostalgia.

Again, I feel that—in suburbia–it was nostalgia from the very start.

@Aspidistra

Is it true that the mail men pick up outgoing mail from your mailbox before they put the incoming stuff in? Because, man, that is an awesome idea. …

Strangely enough, not only is this true, but whenever they raise the cost of mailing a letter a few cents (it’s 49 cents now), people still complain. This is a service which, for 49 cents, will pick up a letter at your front door and deliver it to someone else’s front door on the other side of the country.

@Zsofia

It’s quite rare I think all around the South to see a neighborhood corner post box …

You know, the USPS is removing many of them all over. They’re trying to save on the labor it takes to pick up from these street boxes. When I was a child, though, they were everywhere.

@Kiyoshi

Do the mailmen usually drive on the wrong side of the road?! Why not just have the driver’s seat on the opposite side?

As noted above, they do. As a kid I always wanted to be a mail carrier, so I could drive on the “wrong” side of the car.

@yabob

…In my experience, people do leave private notes, etc, in each other’s mailboxes. I’ve done it. Technically, that is illegal, but the USPS isn’t going to know about it, or, probably, bother with pursuing such a case. They have the rule mostly to prevent hand delivered commercial circulars from being stuffed in the mailboxes.

It’s also so that when people put harmful things in mail boxes (bombs, snakes, etc.), they can have the full weight of Federal law, both to protect the mail carriers (who were full-fledged Federal employees before), and to prosecute.

[Sapo]

@Kiyoshi

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?

Exceptions abound but the short version is that doorside boxes are older than curbside boxes which are in turn older than clusters.

In areas with doorside boxes, letter carriers are either in walking routes (the never drive) or park-and-loop routes (they drive to a block, park and walk around the block delivering mail). In rare cases, letter carriers have mount/dismount routes where they drive to every house and get off the truck to deliver doorside.

In areas with curbside boxes, the carriers drive around in a rightside-steering vehicle and deliver from it.

In clusters, a bunch of mailboxes are set in a grid, similar to what you see in a post office and the carrier delivers the whole lot there and people drive/walk to it to pick up their mail.

@LSLGuy

[big snip]
…
ETA: removed now-redundant answer to Kiyoshi.
[/big snip]

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.

Right. Doorside > curbside > clusters. The post office cannot downgrade service to an area without some seriously involved process which requires 100% consensus from the users. I have seen it done, though. It does happen. Normally the selling point is security. A cluster in a very visible area can be sold as more secure than an unprotected mailbox in front of your well hidden cul-de-sac home.

Of course, the guy who lives right next to where the cluster will be has zero incentive to agree with the proposal so what ends up happening is that they keep their doorside or curbside box while everybody else goes to the cluster. In time they die and the post office changes service to the cluster for the new tenant (if they don’t know to fight it)

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@guizot

I agree with this. My sense is that originally, when the US population started moving more and more from cities to suburbs, people made a point of putting the mailbox on a post by their gate or by the curb, precisely because they wanted to emulate the rural experience, where houses often are quite a distance from the road. It was a way of being non-urban, a way to accentuate that they no longer lived in the city with its problems. It emblematized their escape from the masses on the street. Sure, at a suburban house it does save the mail carrier some steps, but I really think that people were sacrificing the security of a slot in the locked door for the self-assurance of being separate.

I know of absolutely no evidence for this at all. All the history of suburbs show that whether a mail route is car or foot is a matter of the density of the population. As I said earlier, inner suburbs have foot routes for densely populated areas, outer, less dense, suburbs don’t. And people didn’t get to make this decision. The Post Office did.

Yes, but 1974 is long after suburbia sprang up. For so many years the mail carrier of suburbia was happy to walk up to your front door, braving dogs and what not, and yet still suburbia liked the idea of the box on a post at the front picket fence—a sentinel checking entry to the manor. Again, I feel that—in suburbia–it was nostalgia from the very start.

Again, not true. I was a carrier long before 1974 and these routes were established long before I started. I’m sure there was some sort of transition period during which the Post Office needed to figure out what the most efficient way to deliver in different densities but that’s not the same as your scenario.

Strangely enough, not only is this true, but whenever they raise the cost of mailing a letter a few cents (it’s 49 cents now), people still complain.

People may complain, but the cost of a stamp is 44 cents.

If you can cite any actual history better than your “sense” I’d like to read it.

[festiva76]

Here in my neck of the woods, in South Carolina, there are only a couple of vehicles available who have right hand drive ( a Jeep or a Subaru,) or they will sit in the passenger seat and drive from that side, and deliver that way. They seem good at it.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Pleonast

In truly rural areas, mail is not delivered at all. Every resident gets a post-office box (at no cost since there’s no alternative) and has to drive to the post office to get their mail.

The letters RFD, as in the TV series “Mayberry RFD”, refer to Rural Free Delivery. The letters are still a nickname for the back side of beyond.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

Outgoing mail: I live in a house in the urban core, and my mail comes through a slot on the door and falls onto my porch. I put outgoing mail in the slot, with the stamped side sticking out, and they always pick it up. I do this much more often now, since the post office has removed all the mailboxes within 3/4 mile of my house. Last summer, I was working int the yard one day when the mailman came by, and I asked about leaving outgoing letters in the mail slot. He said they were quite happy to pick them up: “we all want to make it easy for you to keep sending mail – our jobs depend on that, after all.”

Technically, a mail slot in the door like mine CAN be used by someone other than the USPO. But most people delivering commercial flyers don’t, because it’s faster to just toss it onto the steps rather than climbing the steps & dropping it in the slot.

Regular mailboxes can NOT be used by anyone except USPO staff. They won’t bother much about occasional note, etc. But if they see a bunch of it, they will. Technically it’s a federal crime, but they seldom prosecute for that. Doing political lit drops, we once had a volunteer who ignored our instructions about not putting it in mailboxes, and did so. That evening, we got a call from the local postmaster, who told us that this had been done 58 times within his zip code, and that he would be sending us a bill for 58 first-class postage stamps plus a $10 service fee, and that failure to pay that within 10 days would be a federal crime, and they could arrest our candidate. We told him we had already heard about it from local residents, and that we had chewed out the volunteer, and made her promise to never do that again. Then the postmaster said they would waive that bill this time, provided this never happened again up to election day. (It may have helped that the postal union had endorsed our candidate.)

Rural mailboxes here in Minnesota, where we get lots of snow, often have the posts set several feet back from the road, with the box projecting out to the roadside on a cantilever arrangement. And there was a local blacksmith who built spring-loaded posts, such that a plow might knock them over, but they just popped back up again. (We also have many very individualized mailboxes: dairy farms where the box is a dairy cow, with mail going into her udder; pig farms where the mailbox looks like a pig, you pull the snout to open the box; beef farms where the box looks like a bull, raising the bulls’ horns to signal that you have outgoing mail, grain farmers where the box looks like a bunch of corn stalks or a giant ear of corn, etc. I don’t know if they would meet the current USPO requirements, but mail carriers seem to accept them just fine.)

[congodwarf]

Before age 5, I have no clue what kind of mailbox we had.

5-14: and 19-21 Lived on first floor of various apartments in a city (250k+ people). Our mailbox was always a set of 3, in the entry to the apartment building (always a 3-decker). Each floor had one. Mail carrier would lift flap and drop mail in. We’d lift flap and take mail out. Large packages were left on the floor under the mailboxes. Outgoing envelopes would be left in the box, wedged under the flap. Outgoing packages would left on top of the mailbox or brought to the PO.

14-18: Single family house still in same city. We had the same kind of mailbox and our mail carrier walked the neighborhood with a large bag and went up each driveway to drop off the mail. Large packages were left either at the front door or the carrier would knock on the door and give it to anyone home. Outgoing mail and packages were generally just handed to the mail carrier or left in the box.

21-27: Condo in a small city (50k+ people). We had grouped boxes for every 15 or so condos. They were generally halfway between the units represented by those boxes. I had to walk past 2 driveways (8 units) to get to my mailbox. The big box was broken into smaller boxes, each with its own key for the small front door. The mail carrier opened the huge back door to access every box at once. For large packages, there were 2 extra large boxes at the bottom which had 2 keys. One key was always in the lock. The second key would be left in your box and you used it to open the box. The key would be stuck in the lock after you used it so you couldn’t steal it. Only the mail carrier was able to remove that second key. Outgoing envelopes were put in the extra outgoing box. Packages were either handed to the mail carrier, left on the box if you were really trusting, or brought to the PO. My box was different from the rest of the condo complex because a snow plow hit ours and knocked it back. Since it wasn’t a city plow, they refused to do anything about it. The condo complex insisted it was the Post Offices issue (even though the PO didn’t knock it over). Everyone insisted nothing could be done til the ground thawed. The PO refused to deliver to the individual units (a whole 16 units in 4 buildings, each with door slots) and they said it was against the law to leave it at the management office. So, all the mail for 16 units, for over a week, was left at the post office. Those of us with cars but jobs were screwed because the PO had short hours. Those without cars were screwed because the PO wasn’t in walking distance. That was NOT a happy time in our neighborhood. The condo association finally came to their senses and had a new mailbox installed (in spite of the frozen ground). We got a super nice one, probably because they were afraid we’d sue them.

My boyfriend’s parents lived in a single family home in the same city and their mailbox was a big one they bought at a home improvement store. It used to be at the bottom of their driveway but when they repaved their driveway, they moved it to halfway up. Their box has a yellow flag and a red flag. They put up the red flag when there’s mail to be picked up. When the carrier opens the door, the yellow flag triggers so they can see from the house whether or not the mail has been delivered. The mailbox is large enough for big packages but massive packages generally come UPS or FedEx and they are left on the porch. Outgoing packages are left in the box the same way that outgoing envelopes are.

My mother has the same mailbox but she lives in a single family home in the large city I mentioned above. Her mailbox is right next to her house, on a post. The mail carrier has to walk between her hedges and up the walkway through the front yard. Outgoing packages could be left in the box but my mom never has the correct postage at home and doesn’t like to interact with her carrier so she just brings them to the PO.

27-29: Trailer park in a small city (different state). We had the same kind of mailboxes in the trailer park as we did in the condo complex. Large packages were delivered individually to the trailers but all regular mail was left in the boxes at the entrance to the park. Outgoing envelopes and packages were either dropped in a mailbox, brought to the PO, or mailed from work.

29-30 (now): Single family house in small town (15k people). Our mail carrier drives from house to house (first time I’ve had a mail carrier drive the whole route). All mailboxes are on posts at the front of the yard. Mine is set too far from the driveway to pick up the mail as I drive in so I just walk over to it. I haven’t had any large packages yes but I imagine she’d just walk it up to the house. We need to get a new mailbox (the current one is slanted since it was hit by a plow before we bought the place). We’re going to get a bigger box (the kind our parents have) and we’ll measure the proper height one of these days when we and the maillady are here at the same time. I’ve seen her trying to access our mailbox. It definitely needs to be higher. I leave outgoing mail in the box. If I have a package AND the postage (or money for the postage), I’ll just hand it to her. If I don’t, I’ll go to the PO.

I have also had a PO box at the post office. I have lived in houses with door flaps but I have never had delivery to a door flap.

No matter where I’ve lived, I’ve always been able to flag down a passing mail carrier to give them mail.

[Corner_Case]

@Kiyoshi

2. Doesn’t everyone’s mail get stolen?

As noted, tampering with or stealing the mail is a federal offense. The movie The Firm is an example where great misdeeds occur, but it is the illegal use of the mail that gets the crooks in the end. Movie Quote Snip

@Chief_Pedant

Installation of curbside mailboxes is also very specific.

Installation of curbside mailboxes must meet our specific construction standards, which you can find at your local Post Office™. For a copy of our standards (United States Postal Service STD-7B, Mailboxes, City and Rural Curbside), write to:

Delivery & Customer SVCS Equipment, Engineering, U.S. Postal Service
8403 LEE HWY
MERRIFIELD VA 22082-8108This indicates that, if you cannot get to your local Post Office, then you can write to get the standards. But you can’t send the letter and can’t receive the standards since you don’t have a mailbox and need the standards to construct one.

[enipla]

@Pleonast

In truly rural areas, mail is not delivered at all. Every resident gets a post-office box (at no cost since there’s no alternative) and has to drive to the post office to get their mail.

It makes sending things to them a little tricky. The post office will not deliver to street addresses there; you must use the PO box number. But private deliveries (UPS, FedEx, etc) will not deliver to PO boxes; you must give them the street address. When ordering something online, you can’t always tell what service the store will use. Usually, you can specify both PO box and street number, but some sites use “intelligent” software to check for non-standard addresses. It can be a pain getting those to accept all the necessary information.

That’s the truth. I don’t have UPS or FedX try to get to our house either. It’s just rough going, and in winter? Um… no.

I try to get things delivered to where I work. But we don’t get mail delivered there either (County Government also has to have a PO Box). Anyway, some sites are not clear on how the ship. Amazon.com is one of them.

[congodwarf]

Since WoW is still down for maintenance, and I have nothing better to do with my time…

Apartment Mailboxes. These are what I had in my 3-decker apartments, although they were always black. You walked in the front door to find the door to the first floor apartment, stairs to the next level, and those 3 boxes on the wall.
Condo Box
This is what we had in the condo complex (my box only) although our box was bigger. The two on the bottom were for the big packages, and right above the bottom right box was the outgoing mail slot. The numbered slots are for each unit.
Condo Box #2
See Condo Box#2 for a small scale example of what we had at the trailer park. Our boxes were larger and I think we had 4 or 5 clusters.

Not quite it but similar to what I have now. My current mailbox is metal (and rusty and leaks) and ugly but otherwise, the basic shape is the same. The post is probably a 4x4, and it has been sunk into a bucket of concrete (yes, a bucket). The bucket of concrete is in the ground. Yes, you can see the bucket. Class, all the way. We will rectify this soon.

Parents. This looks like my boyfriend’s parents’ mailbox. My mother has a very similar one except that her box has a larger capacity and has the second (yellow) flag.

[congodwarf]

Mine! I knew I had a pic of my mailbox. The mail lady drives up but because of the slant and the height difference between my yard and the street, she has a hard time actually reaching it.

[brad_d]

Our house in Long Beach, California was built in 1950. Ours is a walking route, with most residents seeming to have boxes on their porches. (We do.) It’s actually a rather nice decorative mailbox, given to us as a wedding gift back in 2001 but only used since last summer, because until then we lived in an apartment with the big mailbox cluster in the front lobby.

My parents’ house in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, built around 1970, is pretty much the same way: walking route, mailboxes on the porch.

I have many relatives in West Virginia, and when we visited there growing up I was always fascinated by the brightly-colored newspaper “mailboxes” that everybody had. These were plastic things mounted near the real mailbox on the side of the road with the name of the paper emblazoned on the sides - Times West Virginian, or whatever.

Both in Texas then, and in California now, our newspapers were/are simply thrown into our front yard from a moving vehicle. I’m not sure why the difference - weather, maybe? Snow is unheard-of in Long Beach, and rare in the Fort Worth area…

[control-z]

Here is my mailbox after a snowstorm.

At this very moment my flag is up; the mail lady left me a letter yesterday that wasn’t addressed to me.

I’ve often wondered why people’s mail isn’t stolen too, but I guess the contents usually aren’t that interesting.

[maladroit]

I live in a city, and asked my carrier once about outgoing mail pick up. They told me if there was no incoming mail they’re not required to pick up outgoing (but they do if they’re nice). We have a box on our house next to the front door.

When I lived in the suburbs in the early 60’s, we had an acre or so, as did all the neighbors. The mail box was on a post at the highway at the end of our dirt road - maybe a quarter mile from the house. It was us kids’ job to run up the hill and grab the mail. It used to scare me when I was six or so because the woods were close to the road and it was all dark and spooky

[johnpost]

i think the carrier has to pick up outgoing mail from any mailbox if they are aware of it. in a curbside mailbox with a red flag up they will pickup the mail even if they aren’t delivering any. with a porch mailbox they won’t come to the porch and be aware of the outgoing mail if they aren’t delivering any, they won’t look towards your house if there is no delivery.

[Hi_Medlo]

House density is not necessarily the determining factor as to whether mail is delivered by a walking carrier or a mounted (driving) one. The town where I carried was pretty spread out with houses on large lots. A neighboring town had most of it’s houses seperated by just a narrow walkway and management was constantly beating us over the hear with their deliveries per hour numbers!