Why can mailboxes only be used for U.S. mail?

Because it is against Federal law to put anything in a mailbox, “on which no postage has been paid,”. If a person is caught doing so, they could be fined up to $5,000 and an organization could be fined up to $10,000. This is called the “Mailbox Restriction Law”, which does not exist in most countries. In addition, in the U.S., people receiving mail must pay for mailboxes, which have to meet government specifications, or provide slots in their front doors through which postal carriers deliver mail. The Postal Service also “owns” our mailboxes and sets all the regulations involving them. Why?

If you go to the USPS website, the answer you will find is that mailboxes could get so full with other items and papers that there would be no room for mail. Secondly, the USPS says it wants “to ensure the integrity of our customer’s mailbox,” meaning only postal workers are allowed to place or remove mail from our mailboxes. History teaches us that while all this is true, there is always more to the story.

Use of First Class mail and package delivery expanded sharply in the early 1900’s. Commercial users of postal services found that the expense of postage higher than if they delivered their own mail. They began using their own carriers to deliver what otherwise would be primarily First Class Mail, in order to avoid paying U.S. postage. At the time, the biggest source of revenue for the Post Office was First Class Mail, so private carriers were reducing the revenue coming into the postal agency. The U.S. Post Office went to Congress and asked for a law to constrain this competition by making it against the law for anyone else to use a mailbox. In 1934, the New Deal Democratic Congress complied, as the postal system had enormous political power within the Democratic Party. Every town and city had postal employees and they voted to have the “mailbox restriction” law (18 U.S.C. 1725). This gave the Post Office what one government official observed as “a virtual monopoly over mailboxes”. In addition, if any flyer or other item was found in the mailbox without postage, the Post Office could force the person putting it in to pay postage for it, even if it had not been delivered by postal carriers.

Did it work? Yes, more or less. It seemed as though the Post Office had crushed its competition—at least for a while. Flyers, advertisements and newspapers continued to be delivered, but they were now instead stuck inside front doors, underneath welcome mats, and left on stoops and front yards. First Class mail still had to go through the Post Office.

Mailbox by ms.akr via CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

E-mail was introduced in the 1980’s, followed by online shopping and banking in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. The volume of First Class mail dropped every year, and as the quantity dropped, the Post Service increased the price of a First Class stamp, which motivated people to increase their usage of e-mail and to start paying their bills online. This further reduced the demand for First Class stamps. The utility companies that had initially created problems for the Post Office made it increasingly possible for bills to be paid online. Package delivery services, which offered better services often at less cost than the Post Office became widely available in the 1990’s, which took even more business away from the Postal Service.

Until the arrival of the Internet and e-mail, the American postal system was the nation’s largest and most sophisticated information delivery infrastructure. Its power and legacy stemmed from its role of the movement of facts and all manners of paper-based reading materials. For example, the design of a round “tunnel type” mailbox was designed by a postal employee designed in 1915, used in front of homes and businesses which are still popular a century later. Therefore, the U.S. Postal Service remains an important part of the nation’s information infrastructure.

In 2016, the Postal Service handled 154 billion pieces of mail, employed 600,000 people, and operated out of over 31,000 post offices. The total revenue from the U.S. mailing industry was $1.4 trillion. From this revenue, $71.4 billion came from the U.S. Postal Service. First Class mail brought in $27.3 billion, still constituting the biggest part of its revenues. As the Postal Service likes to point out, “If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 39th in the 2016 Fortune 500.” The humble mail box continues to be an integral part of our twenty-first century information infrastructure, even if the Post Office no longer has a lock on mail delivery.

Headline image credit: Mailboxes by Moosealope via CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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