I don’t send snail mail letters and I don’t like to receive them. I have terrible handwriting and I don’t like reading other people’s chicken scratch either.
Cards are usually a necessary evil.
I have one friend I semi-regularly correspond with through snail mail, but I met her online and most of our communication is through LiveJournal. We just like sending each other letters.
I just finished reading Arthur Honegger’s letters to his parents (he was a Swiss/French composer, 1892-1955), and it made me realize that my equivalent of that is probably my LiveJournal, sad as that is.
I started a snail mail correspondance with my boyfriend when I was studying in Europe for a year. I carried my notepad with me and wrote either when I had an idle thought, or needed to kill time. After a week or four pages (small notepad), I mailed out the letter. We still communicated by e-mail and IM, but I found that I ended up putting in little details that I wouldn’t necessarily remember when I was sitting at the computer. This was an exceptional situation, though. I don’t do cards, so usually, the only things I send by snail mail are bills and the occasional thank-you note.
I write letters to my grandmother, because she’s very hard of hearing so talking to her on the phone is like playing some cruel, twisted game of Gossip. Also, she’s 90, and the letters I receive from her will be physical keepsakes after she passes on. Otherwise, I don’t really have anybody to write letters to. I enjoy it, though - I love my vintage fountain pens and nice paper.
The art of the letter has disappeared, though, and I can tell because even Crane’s hardly stocks any letter sheets anymore. It’s all foldover cards and, even worse, correspondance cards. Who only has an index card’s worth to write? Why bother?