Hypothetical question : Let’s suppose that I was going through my mail and found a letter addressed to an immediately adjacent neighbor. Basically, the mailman transposed the last 2 digits or something when he sorted the mail out.
So, instead of making a big deal about it, I decide to fix the mailman’s mistake. I walk a house or 2 down, open up their unlocked mailbox, toss in the letter, and close the door.
If a federal agent happens to be watching from the bushes, have I committed a felony?
What if the cops are watching me because they suspect me of being a seriously bad dude, and they happen to see this? If it turns out that they can’t find any evidence I’m a bad dude, can they still slam me with a felony charge over me trying to be helpful with the mail? Maybe bust in my house and see if any mattress tags are ripped off?
I’ve done this a bunch of times. I was receiving items for a neighbor at the rate of a couple per week. I’d routinely drop them in his mailbox. I got tired of this, and informed the local Post Office. They thanked me for my trouble and said they’d tell the delivery guy to try to do better. The rate dropped to a couple per month, then basically to zero.
No hint of the possibility of criminal prosecution was ever mentioned.
Based on my experiences with the USPS here, they are totally uninterested in who is going into who’s mailbox. In fact, the local postmaster told me to my face that the only way they would be interested in somebody stealing our mail out of the box is if we thought it was the mailman??! This is based on direct experience.
So I don’t think you have too much to worry about.
[QUOTE= 18 U.S. Code § 1705]
Whoever willfully or maliciously injures, tears down or destroys any letter box or other receptacle intended or used for the receipt or delivery of mail on any mail route, or breaks open the same or willfully or maliciously injures, defaces or destroys any mail deposited therein, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
[/QUOTE]
[Emphasis added]
If it was locked and you opened it, then you’d potentially be on the hook (you don’t even have to have broken it open maliciously, just that you meant to open it). But nothing there about just opening a mail box.
[QUOTE=18 U.S. Code § 1725]
Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter such as statements of accounts, circulars, sale bills, or other like matter, on which no postage has been paid, in any letter box established, approved, or accepted by the Postal Service for the receipt or delivery of mail matter on any mail route with intent to avoid payment of lawful postage thereon, shall for each such offense be fined under this title.
[/QUOTE]
And this says you can’t put things in a mailbox with the intent to avoid payment of postage, but otherwise it appears to be fine.
So legally, I think you’re fine, at least as far as 18 USC (federal mail law) goes, anyway.
Confusion ay have carried over from before the USPS. About 1970 the Postal Department was reorganized. I recall when personal mail boxes said ‘property of the US’, many rural addresses were changed etc.
I once heard that the box on the house next to the front door is only an Official Mailbox if it has U.S. Postal / USPS or similar signage. Is this true? At what point does a box become a mailbox?
In my unmarked box, I get fliers for local contractors (landscapers, roofers, concrete, etc) churches, pizza & Chinese joints and others all the time. Once, a neighbor left photocopied letters informing the neighborhood of a string of garage burglaries. Our block party organizers drop off updates there, too.
Surely this is not subject to a fine, right?
Strictly legally speaking you cannot take the mis-delivered mail and put it in your neighbor’s mailbox. Reality is nobody enforces this law.
Could Postal Inspectors come after you for this if for some reason they wanted to get something on you. The answer is yes. Would a judge give you prison time if this happened to you for some reason. No, not unless there was a conspiracy to nail you regardless of the seriousness of the crime. There is zero malicious intent and zero damage done by you taking such an action. You’ve just done a good deed.
Nobody but a USPS employee can put mail in a mailbox. Others who put flyers and ads and anything else in mailboxes are committing a crime. In the case of flyers and ads, the people who put those in mailboxes sometimes do get in trouble with the law. I’ve seen this happen a number of times. If you aren’t paying the post office for postage and put items/ads in the mailbox this is one thing they definitely will come after you for. Really it depends on your mailman to bring this to attention of the highers up for this sort of thing to be noticed. If the mailman is indifferent to such activity then you’ll almost certainly get away with it.
Not the OP but jnglmassiv asked what counts as a mailbox. Hehehe. A huge percentage of the population uses non-regulation mailboxes that technically by the letter of the law are not allowed. It would be a fiasco if suddenly the USPS tried to force the public to only use regulation mailboxes. If your mailbox isn’t regulation the USPS can refuse to deliver your mail and force you to come down to the post office and wait in line to pick up your mail.
I know from almost first hand experience that sometimes the post office can get really pissy about this. About fifteen years ago we lived in a subdivision of 200-odd homes with a homeowners association that was quite sane, with broad community participation.
An affable gent got elected to the board. He managed to convince the board to make some rule changes that weren’t popular. A group organized to oppose the change. They put a notice in every mailbox in the subdivision asking homeowners to come to the upcoming town hall style meeting where the proposed changes would be discussed.
The new board member was a supervisor at a USPS sorting facility. Before the meeting postal inspectors were “interviewing” the opponents of the change, threatening them with 200+ charges of violating this provision. The fine for EACH violation was in the thousands.
They lawyered up, and I don’t think anything ever came of it. But the board member that everyone believed instigated this over-the-top reaction was voted off the board the next year. He a always denied that he had anything to do with the postal inspectors showing up.
Yeah, the post office doesn’t like it if you use post boxes for fliers and stuff. That’s why political campaigns use “door knockers”, which are designed to be hung from a door knob.
But I have delivered my neighbor’s misdelivered mail, and probably put it in their mailbox, and it never occurred to me to worry about it. It might be technically illegal, but there’s not a soul who would be upset if they learned you’d done it.
I’ve delivered mis-directed mail to a neighbors house about once a month or so. never q problem, and no reason to worry about it.
Fliers, etc. used to come in my mailbox occasionally – now they’re so careless I’m lucky if they even make it onto my front steps instead of just somewhere on the lawn or bushes!
working on political campaigns, we were careful to explain to volunteers that they MUST not put them in mailboxes. Both because it’s illegal, and because it defeats the purpose – we want the resident to know that some volunteer cared enough to hand-deliver this to their house. Postal carriers generally don’t care if it doesn’t happen too much. (It might help that our candidates are generally also endorsed by the postal workers union.) But I know of one candidate who got in trouble about this. The Postal Inspectors actually went to the print shop who printed his literature to get the number of pieces printed, then wanted to charge him 1st class postage for that many thousand pieces, plus a fine. (It was settled for much less, plus desperate promises to never do that again.) The just wanted money, not sending anyone to jail.
But opening a mailbox can be a felony, if you then steal something from it. (Or a misdemeanor, depending on the value of what you steal.)
In the past I have delivered some cards to people only because I was in the neighborhood and it wasn’t much hassle for me. I was surprised to find the cards I delivered sitting in my mailbox with a ‘postage due’ tag on them a few days later.
I have also tried putting a mothers day and birthday card in the same envelope to save on postage, since it was going to the same person. Apparently they attached a ‘postage due’ on the delivered mail, which i assume was because it was little too thick, or overweight, which the recipient had to pay.
Forgot to mention in the above post. I made a report to the local police. I must say, they did have the grace to stifle most of their yawns while taking it down.
When I had a route one summer I don’t remember a lot of unauthorized mailboxes. Slots are legal - we had one in the door in the house I grew up in, and now we have one in the garage with a USPS bar code.
I suppose that someone could make a non-regulation mailbox, but I’d suspect that any you’d buy in the store meet the requirements. What do the non-regulation ones you saw look like?
Hehehe. When I used to deliver mail I have seen cardboard boxes sitting on the front porch used as mailboxes. Wicker baskets, buckets, home made wooden mailboxes. With the street side free standing mailboxes I’ve seen all kind of custom cool mailboxes of various animals, miniature houses that look like the main house, one that looks like a postal vehicle. If your kid made a mailbox in wood shop you would put it at your house. And more…
My wife is a real estate agent, and agents commonly use flyers and mailers – her company is serious about their agents not putting flyers on or in mailboxes, and she always pays postage and does a proper mailing even when she’s just trying to reach people in our own neighborhood. She’s always annoyed by roofers and Chinese takeout places and pizza joints who leave flyers in or on our mailbox.
I personally hate anyone coming door-to-door even more (when you have a baby and a couple of protective dogs, an unexpected ring of the doorbell can bring a lot of chaos into your world. Our neighborhood has NO SOLICITING signs at the entrances, but they do no good. Our next house might get one right at the front door.
I get lots of mis-delivered mail. I once stopped a mailman and asked him what I was supposed to do with it. He said “drop it in the nearest mailbox.” So that’s what I do now. I figure, if I do their job for them, I’m just encouraging further sloppiness. But if I make them do it over until they get it right, they are more likely to improve their process.
The police stopped a guy who was driving thru my neighborhood and warned him for putting things in our mailboxes, but that was because someone had stolen things out of our mailboxes the week before.
I think it was the highlight of the police’s day - we don’t get a lot of crime where I live.
But I have done the same thing of putting something misdelivered to me in the correct mailbox. Doesn’t a crime need a mens rea?