What’s also addressed there is that on many rural routes, all the mailboxes are on one side of the street or the other. For example, where I grew up in Colorado, the mailboxes on my street (that ran east-west) were all on the north side. My across-the-street neighbor had to cross the street to get her mail; her box was mounted right next to ours. That way, the mailman (who drove a right-side-drive truck) just had to pass down our road once a day.
Not sure where it was decreed that my road was a north-side route; a similar parallel road that ran half-mile to the north had boxes on the south.
And to confuse things a bit: newer subdivision roads that connected the two E/W roads had their residents’ boxes on both sides.
I happened to be the newspaper boy for a couple of years in my neighborhood. Most of my customers had special boxes mounted on the same pole for newspapers only. It was definately easier to deliver just biking down the road once; I had to do a lot of loops and turns to deliver on a street with boxes on both sides.
We were also schooled to never put papers in the designated US Mail boxes, even if the paperbox was full. (They’re all stamped with the warning just in case.) Even innocent little adverts can get someone in deep trouble.
The only was to legally put something in one is to pay postage, give it to a postman or post office, and let them put it in.
wrt to mail theft: many years ago, my step-son was walking home from school, stopped at our curbside mailbox, and reached inside to get the contents. The local constabulary happened to be right there, snagged him and escorted him to the front door: “DO YOU KNOW THIS BOY??!!??” My wife read them the riot act.
It was a small, quiet and fairly well-off suburb, and the cops apparently had nothing else to do.
Another issue besides theft is vandalism. If you ever see the movie “Stand By Me”, there’s a scene where Jack Bauer… I mean, Ace Merrill and his cronies are driving down a rural road as Ace leans out of the window with a baseball bat and smashes mailboxes. (It’s called “mailbox baseball”.) There’re serious penalties for vandals if they’re caught.
In a neighborhood plagued by such vandals (it was down the street from a high school where students would do this after sports victories), one resident had had enough. He had some industrial heat sink metal (1/4 - 1/2 inch thick iron with protruding fins) that he welded together to make a mailbox-shaped strongbox. Don’t know if any idiots tried to whack it, but the guy didn’t have to ever replace it due to damage. One story was that cops had told him to change it because it wasn’t postmaster-general approved. He then said he would when there were no more mailboxes smashed along the road. Last time I went down the street (15 years after the first time I’d seen it), it was still there.
In Australia, at least my neck of suburbia, it’s between the two. No one has door slots, and no one has them flush to the road (it might not be allowable in the nature strip)
I deliver junk mail - seemingly the type laws in the US are designed to prevent - mail boxes come in all shapes and sizes. Lots of brick edifices to combat vandalism, and too many stupid narrow slots
Except that I do have to pay for my box. $30 a year. I don’t know how they’re allowed to do that when I don’t have a choice, but there it is.
And with Amazon I tend to use my house address just in case they send it here by UPS or something. If they mail it, though, the post office people are kind enough to hold it for me, and then I get to feel real stupid picking it up.
Two books which would make me think this are Building the Dream and A History of Domestic Space, though neither addresses mail boxes specifically, and the latter is about Canada. That’s why it’s only a sense on my part. However, I was not aware that USPO has always– from the beginning–dictated the placement of mail boxes on ones property. And if the density of the housing is the only determinant, that doesn’t explain neighborhoods I’ve seen with houses which have both separate boxes and door slots.
It also doesn’t explain mailboxes which are so far from the curb they might as well be door slots. The only other explanation I can think is that the homeowner doesn’t want to remodel a wall or door for a slot.
In my experience, many older houses have a mail slot plus a mailbox near the door. The mail slots are usually inadequate for the types and volumes of mail we get now. Mail slots are fine for letters, but magazines, catalogs and flimsy flyers stuffed with other ads just don’t mix well with old fashioned mail slots.
I have a mailslot in my door, though many houses in my neighborhood have mailboxes by the door. The mail delivery guy manages, and I get a lot of garbage in magazine format. It fits, although the carrier has to feed things like that through one or two at a time. I simply prefer having the slot, and would be annoyed if the USPS made me put up a mailbox like many of my neighbors.
