Hello all.
I am delurking after a year or so because I decided that this seems to be the place where people are both intelligent and devious enough to answer this question.
I need, I mean I have this friend, who needs to mail a very small package from one part of the country to another. Lets say I, I mean he, lives on the west coast, and he needs to send the package to a nearby town, but the postmark or whatever needs to make it appear that the package came from Roanoake, Virginia. (I will find out how to spell Roankoke before I send it.).
Anyway, this is not anything illegal certainly, no drugs or bombs anything like that, and nothing of extreme or irreplaceable value. (Actually it is a cassette tape). But I do need to somehow get this mailed, and postmarked from Raoanoke.
Are there places that do that ? If I sent it to “Postmaster”, and inside was the envelope stamped and ready
to go, would he just cancel it and pass it on ? If I had to throw in a five dollar bill for the hassle, would that help ?
I thought about forging a postmark somehow but I’d probably screw it up, and maybe thats illegal, and the federal penitentiairy doesnt look like fun.
Some cities have special forwarding addresses. There’s a town called Love (somewhere) that will forward your valentines if you send them there. That way, your letter is postmarked as being from “Love”.
Other than that, I have no answser to your OP, and shouldn’t have posted at all. But I did.
You’d use something called a ‘mail drop.’ Search the web, you might find something in the city you want. You mail it to someone & they drop it in the mail for you for a few bucks. Dunno if they are still doing it.
Simply mail your item (with postage on it) to the post master of the city you want on the postmark. You should include a small note saying “please remail this”. I have done this several times for reasons you don’t need to know, and it works every time! You can also use a mail drop service or a remailing service. Both are found in the yellow pages or the backs of magazines like Soldier of Fortune, and both charge a small fee, like a buck, to remail items.
Just as an aside, you can do the same thing with e-mail. You can find programs or sites that will anonymously remail a message and will put a return addy of your choice on it. The address does not have to be a real one. Just type ‘remailers’ at any standard search engine and browse until you find one right for you.
As an aside, and as a quite illegal activity, if you find yourself without stamps and needing to mail something, simply put your address in the “To” area, and the address you want it to go to in the “from” area … drop it in a mailbox (not your own … a public one) and it’ll get “returned” to the From address for lack of postage. I’ve done it when in a bind a few times (nothing important, mind you … notes to friends) and it actually works!
pkbites has it right. Just send your letter (already addressed and with proper postage) in a separate envelope to the postmaster of the town you want it postmarked in. Include a note asking him/her to forward it for you. Also make sure you include your name and address, because I know that at least some postmasters keep a log of these things (just in case). Stamp collectors do this all the time for “first day covers.”
