Recently I became a member of Postcrossing, a community of deltiologists that send and receive postcards to each other. It’s extremely simple: you’re given a random address to send a card to, and when it arrives another stranger will get your address and send you a card.
Each card is assigned a code, and when it arrives I enter the code to verify receipt. It’s a simple and effective system.
At first you can only send/receive five at a time but this increases with use. I’m up to seven now. While you don’t have any control over the recipients, you can elect to exclude your country which I have.
At first I wondered if it was weird to send cards to strangers but it’s not at all. I can write about anything and I do, but I often include mundanities such as the weather or what I just ate! Here’s a message that was written to me:
It’s fun seeing people’s preferences (one woman today liked cards featuring buckets, another requested no cards with toucans on them!) and trying to pick cards they like. Mostly though I’ve been sending Albany cards.
Of course another nice aspect of getting cards from all over the world are the stamps! In my profile I’ve requested animal/nature stamps and already people seem to have obliged.
I’ve been doing this only two months and have received fifteen cards. Living in the USA is a disadvantage since it quickly became apparent how slow our mail is. Postcrossing tracks all sorts of statistics that show, for instance, that it takes about 8 days for a card I send to arrive in Germany but 16 days for theirs to arrive here.
Although I’m still relatively new to the service I’m loving it so far. Some users have sent/received thousands of cards! Whether I ever get to that stage who knows, but for now I’m just happy whenever a new card arrives from distant shores 🙂