General > General Technical Chat
Do you have a physical mailbox at your house for receiving mail?
Stray Electron:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on March 07, 2023, 07:14:27 pm ---This must be very location specific.
I have a box, about 3/4 kilometer (notice the clever use of fraction units in the metric system) down the road on a stand with all the other neighbors boxes. The USPS provides email notification of first class letters upon request. There are a couple of larger lockers adjacent and the postman places larger packages there and leaves the key in our box. If the box doesn't fit the lockers, or if there are more large deliveries than lockers the postman will usually drive to our house and leave the package on the doorstep (along with the days letter mail). All of this service is free. There has been an upturn in mail theft in this area, so ours is a locking type that allows insertion of letters and small packages but requires a key for removal. About two years ago all of the non locking boxes on our stand were pilfered, and whoever it was left a fine clear fingerprint on ours as he/she attempted unsuccessfully to get ours. Once upon a time mail theft was so seriously pursued by the postal police that it was a rare crime. Apparently not so much anymore.
I see no benefit to using a PO box. I would have to pay the fees for the PO box, and periodically have to make a 10 km trip to the location for the box. Or use a closer one (about 3 km) that has a very sketchy reputation on social media for reliability. In this country a PO box is not a defense against junk mail. While junk mail will not be forwarded to a PO box, it takes the purveyors of this trash very little time to find out where to find you, as I discovered when using a PO box during a temporary relocation. I am sure this is one of the "benefits" of big data.
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I absolutely agree with your last paragraph.
In Florida, ALL of the newer communities (the past 25? years) are being forced to use those community mail boxes. Legally, the USPS is supposed to deliver mail directly the door of elderly and disabled people but in many places they won't. My mother (in her 80s) and my mother in law (in her 90s) both had community mail boxes in their area and the service absolutely SUCKED! The mail carrier constantly stuff the boxes full of junk mail but then left notices that they were too full to handle their regular mail and the owner would have to make a trip to the local post office (and stand in line for 45 minutes) to get their mail. The mail carrier also paid NO attention to who's box they stuffed the mail into and nearly everyday, my mother and MIL had to make the rounds of their neighborhood to deliver mail that had been stuffed in their box and to try and find out where their own mail went to!
To me, a community mail box and/or an HOA are two reasons that I would NEVER live in a certain communities. I live in an older neighborhood that still has mail delivery to an on the street mail box but the service here is still poor. From some reason, our route always seems to get the substitute delivery person and at least a couple of times per week they put the wrong mail in the wrong box. They're usually one house number off but they're almost always consistent, they mis-deliver the mail to EVERY house on the street!
My neighbors and I all seem to receive a lot of packages and the package delivery people have all been good about putting our packages right in front of our front doors. And there is NO package theft in my neighborhood, most of the people including most of the women in this neighborhood are gun owners & carriers and the local hoodlums stay well away from this neighborhood!
One of my friends lives in one of the smaller towns in Florida and he is quickly going completely blind, and the USPS has been very accommodating for him. One of his family installed a mail box right onto on the back door of his house and his USPS person brings his mail down his driveway and around back of his house and walks it up a ramp and deposits it right into his backdoor mail box.
Stray Electron:
--- Quote from: Someone on March 09, 2023, 12:37:23 am ---
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on March 07, 2023, 07:14:27 pm ---I have a box, about 3/4 kilometer (notice the clever use of fraction units in the metric system) down the road on a stand with all the other neighbors boxes. The USPS provides email notification of first class letters upon request. There are a couple of larger lockers adjacent and the postman places larger packages there and leaves the key in our box. If the box doesn't fit the lockers, or if there are more large deliveries than lockers the postman will usually drive to our house and leave the package on the doorstep (along with the days letter mail). All of this service is free.
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Who provides and maintains the extra lockers/boxes with keys? "free" is a wobbly term.
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Around here, the "lockers" LOL! are below the regular community mailboxes. IIRC there are six or eight of the "lockers". When they leave a package in one, the mail carrier is supposed to leave the key to that locker in the mailbox of the person receiving the package. That way the person can open the "locker" to get their package. They leave the key in the locker and the mail carrier has a 2nd key so they can retrieve the first key later. But 9 times out of 10, they leave the wrong key in the box! Also locker is a completely ridiculous terms for the cubbyholes that they use. The "locker" is about the same size as a shoe box but only about half the length. I doubt that anything larger than about 6 inches in any axis would fit. My mother and mother in law had to make trips to the post office to collect their packages MOST of the time. I get a lot of packages at my home so I installed the largest mailbox that is USPS Approved and it is considerably larger than the cubbyholes on the community mail boxes.
Speaking for my part of the world, most of the neighborhoods are now PUDs. PuD is supposed to mean Planned Urban Development but it's really just a Do-What-You-Want blank check to the developer. They're usually built by one commercial developer and they put in the community mail boxes but then "give" them and the property that they're sitting on to the USPS. The USPS is supposed to maintain them. They provide each resident a key to their particular box, just like if you got a box at the post office itself. If you lose the key then they replace it but they charge you a fee for.
Stray Electron:
--- Quote from: VK3DRB on March 11, 2023, 04:34:43 am ---I have one at home AND a PO Box. The PO box is going at the end of this month - Australia Post is charging too much for stuff-all benefit to me. A waste of money. There is a paradigm that anyone who needs PO Box must have something to hide.
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Several of my friends and several family members are in law enforcement and they all use PO boxes exclusively. Even things like their power bill are not in their own name and are sent to a PO box. The reason is probably obvious. Even their outgoing mail is taken to the PO and put directly into the mail drop there instead of using the mail drop offs around town. YMMV.
When I was living and working in Canada, I keep a PO box in northern New York state and I drove down and checked it a couple of times per week. The Canadian Post was delivered by snails!
Jester:
We have a mailbox and use it daily. We are fortunate to have near zero crime in our neighborhood. Sometimes we are away at the cottage for a few days and if Amazon delivers something, it just sits on the front steps for a few days until we get home. We have never lost anything that I am aware of in the last 60+ years. We live in an old neighborhood 10 minutes from the city center (population 1M)
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: Jester on March 11, 2023, 10:53:22 pm ---Sometimes we are away at the cottage for a few days and if Amazon delivers something, it just sits on the front steps for a few days until we get home. We have never lost anything that I am aware of in the last 60+ years.
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Wow. Do the same over here and I don't give the parcel a few hours before it disappears. And it's not Philly either!
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