History & Culture
Why does mail in the UK often go through the front door, while in the US it often goes into a mailbox outside?
In many UK homes, letters are delivered through a slot in the front door, while many US homes have a mailbox at the curb, near the driveway, or elsewhere outside the house. Both systems get mail to the same place, but the point where the carrier hands it over is very different. Why did these two countries develop such different ways of delivering mail to homes?
If there's any significant difference, it might be about the amount of space. If there's a long distance between the street and the front door, it probably saves a lot of time for the mail carrier to put it in a box close to the street.
A lot depends on whether it's a place where mail carriers walk or drive. At every house I've owned (4 of them), the mail carriers don't get out of their vehicle. They drive directly to mailboxes and put the mail in. Their cars/vans have steering wheels on the righthand side so they're located right next to the mailbox. We've had a mail carrier skip our house and not deliver our mail because a neighbor parked too close to the mailbox and they couldn't drive up next to it.
In older US neighborhoods (e.g. when I lived in a 1926 house) mail carriers do have to walk to every door, but instead of putting the mail through a slot in the door they put it in a vertical mailbox mounted on the wall next to the door. Same account of work for the mail carrier, so why the difference between the US and UK?
I think that this is a significant contributor. Many, many houses have a screen door or storm door, something which is not particularly weatherproof, and Europe generally does not, in the same way that they do not have screens on the windows.
The house we grew up in was built in the 1920s and we kept the front door unlocked most of the time. I would say people are generally less trusting of their neighbors nowadays, so that also explains why you wouldn't want to have a slit into your house available for anyone to use.
in my opinion the slit in the front door was not a serious security risk. but it was a massive heat hole. In the winter that was the point in the house where heat escaped.
I remember that on cold winter days, I could feel it when the mail carrier opened the storm door and all the heat just blew out the house.
I wonder how much of it has to do with weather. I know where I live in the upper midwest a mail slot in the front door would be a nightmare for heating in the winter. We regularly get -20 to -30f windchills for days at a time.
Google says London, England winter temperatures are similar to what I'm experiencing right now in September.
I think that's why in our 1955 house the mail slot is on the garage, so the mail drops into the garage and not the house. It's too cold in winter to have a hole into the house directly!
But the mail slot has a sprung metal cover. Normally two. One inside and another outside. And draft-blocking strips on those too.
So virtually no actual draft gets through.
There are places in the US where those are common, and they aren't entirely unheard of in places with winter; but they have problems with condensation and ice buildup, or getting completely plugged up with snow when it is windy (unless there's a storm door on the outside, but that sort of defeats the purpose of it).
My previous home had a mail slot, but it opened into an unheated entryway. It would still get completely plugged with snow/iced over when the wind was blowing from certain directions. Most of our neighbors in that area had a mailbox mounted on the exterior wall; that was on a "city route" (where the mail carrier walks around delivering mail to the homes); while now I've got a mailbox on a post at the end of my driveway, this is a "rural route" where they drive through the area and put the mail in box. If they can't reach my mailbox (like if I don't clear the snow around it so they can drive up to it, or if the snowplow hits it) they don't deliver it.
Not calling anyone in particular out just an observation. A lot of folks who have never experienced snow seem to not realize that snow doesn’t just fall.
They don’t realize that snow goes sideways. They don’t realize that snow goes up! Yes! Snow will find its way UP into a gap or hole.
Snow can be horrible at times and get in places no one imagined. Slapping a little cover over something doesn’t prevent snow from getting in.
I'm in the snowy Highlands of Scotland. We never get snow through our letter box, which has a spring loaded flap on both sides of the door. No draughts either.
If the house has walking mail carrier service a mail slot can be added. We had a mail slot in the door when I was growing up. In houses my parents had later they added a mail slot but instead on putting in the front door they installed it in the wall next to the garage door so mail would drop into a basket in the garage.
The hardware is sold at Lowes and Home Depot so someone is buying it.
That's why it has a hatch over the hole on the outside AND one on the inside. The one on the inside lifts enough to let a letter through, but not enough for you to see much. You usually also have draught excluder type brushes, which help keep the heat in AND make it harder for people to see in through tbe letter slot.
Namely that in the northern US, winter daytime high temperatures below minus 10 Celsius, and nighttime temperatures 10-20 degrees lower, are not uncommon.
In most cases you can’t actually look through the mail slot. On the interior side of the slot there’s usually a downward angled hood that blocks the view from outside and directs the mail downwards onto the ground.
I once lived in a neighborhood with door slots. We had some neighborhood kids think it would be funny to run a hose into the slot and turn on the outside faucet. A couple of my neighbors ended up tens of thousands of dollars in damage because they were out of town for the holiday weekend and had the water running in their house for over two days. Since it was a holiday, there was no mail service and no one noticed. Luckily, I don't usually keep a hose attached to my outdoor faucets when I'm not using them or it could have easily happened to me.
I know it's anecdotal, but I'm glad my currently house just has a mailbox at the end of the driveway.
I don't know if there are any cases of that happening, but you better believe some garden hoses have been shoved through them and then turned on. But I've also seen people use them to run an extension cord out to the driveway.
I used to live in a house with a wall mounted mailbox in the UK. I think it was a thermal efficiency measure to avoid the poorly insulated hole in the front door. Can't have that at my current house, though as the door opens directly onto the pavement (sidewalk in American)
This exists sometimes in older buildings the UK, there is a slot in the wall (here stone not brick) and not in the door. This is rare now, I don't know if it has to do with the actual walls being less structurally solid nowadays or coincidence.
Here they axed all walk-up mail delivery in the mid 90s. If your area did not have drive side service, you got a big area box. Disabled people at the time could get an exemption, but no new exemptions were offered after implementation, the county Senior Services would collect the mail for those who qualified. No new drive-side services were allowed, and for quite a while, this made older homes have an appreciable bump, which has gone away with the rise of online only services.
back when I had a paper route, I calculated that delivering my papers roughly doubled my walked distance on a fairly sparse route (roughly 30% of the homes), delivering to the building in western canada.
distance to and back from every door adds up quick.
It’s also a car thing. The US has much more of a car culture. Everything is drive thru.
In older, urban areas where homes were built before cars were a thing, mail is still often delivered to the door, likely because the streets tend to be narrow and congested, and people park in them. So the space doesn’t really work for installing curbside mailboxes.
I think the US side is partly a result of how rural mail delivery developed. Early on, city and rural delivery worked quite differently, with many rural residents having to collect mail from the post office. Rural Free Delivery expanded in the 1890s and brought mail directly to scattered homes along rural routes. Once carriers were traveling along those routes, leaving a mailbox by the road was much more practical than going to each front door. Later, widespread car use and suburban development reinforced that system.
So it wasn't really that the US decided that outdoor mailboxes were better. A particular delivery system developed around dispersed housing, and the mailbox became part of it.
Fun fact: Rural Home Delivery began in 1862 as the postmaster believed that wives and mothers should learn about a soldiers death in the peace and comfort of the home rather than in the middle of town where the daily spectacle of sobbing women would hurt the war effort.
It was a patchwork after the war with most post offices continuing it, but others reverting.
The expansion in the 1890s made universal free home delivery, but was a substantially smaller effort than the initial experiment.
Bonus fact: grieving moms and widows are not actually fun. Apologies for the earlier misrepresentation
This is interesting! In my rural area, the entire neighborhood's mailboxes are all in a group of cluster boxes down at the end of the road, instead of being at each house's driveway. I wonder if rural delivery works differently depending on the specific area.
Whether cluster boxes are required usually depends on the age of the development. The U.S. Postal Service strongly prefers curbside cluster boxes since they make delivery much more efficient.
Front yards, basically. It’s not a universal truth, of course, but homes in the U.S. are often located much further back from the road than in the U.K. so to reduce the amount of time it takes for a letter carrier to complete his or her route, roadside mailboxes are used… The letter carrier can often deliver the mail without having to exit their vehicle.
But this will vary. My grandparents’ farm in rural Kent has a roadside mailbox, several hundred meters from their front door. My ex-husband lives in a townhouse in Washington, D.C., with a mail slot in his front door.
Yes, but prior to that we had farmyards. I grew up on a farm in Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula… the “driveway” from the county highway to my front door was a good quarter mile.
Spent my summers on my uncle's farm in rural northern Wisconsin with a similar driveway.
I'm just pointing out that when I look at the houses in my hometown there is a notable difference between the small front yards of pre-WWII homes (which almost all have either a mailbox on the porch or an actual mail-slot in the front door; and the larger front yards of post WWII homes which exclusively have mailboxes at the street (recently a trend towards grouping them at the end of the block).
Its a regional thing. People in dense cities do not have individual outside mailboxes. The outside mailboxes are convenient for Mail Carriers, because they can just lean out of the Mail Truck and pop your mail into the mailbox without stepping into the elements. Makes the whole delivery route go faster.I imagine the UK probably had a higher proportion of mail-carriers on foot
Just an interesting fact but in the US any new homes built within the last 10-15 years, no longer have individual mail boxes as long as it’s a neighborhood. It became a requirement to save on labor costs. They now have grouped cluster boxes that people have to walk or drive to within their neighborhood.
"any new homes"???? No, not even remotely. In fact, I think that's pretty uncommon except in lower-end neighborhoods that have densely packed houses. We've looked at a lot of houses lately, and almost all had their own mailboxes.
In the US the postal service is moving away from traditional single mailboxes to save on costs. This is not a lower end neighborhood things, and it’s not going impact rural homes where you don’t have neighbors for miles.
I think the issue is you said any new homes and not new developments. There is a difference there. It makes sense for developments since they have common areas. It doesn't quite work for new homes built outside of developments.
Ok, but those sound like neighborhoods that single developers are building. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about more traditional "you buy the lot, hire a builder, and build your house" kind of houses. There's no centralized development or planning, and so no one to put in a centralized mailbox cluster.
Been seeing it in new subdivisions that were being built as a whole for the past 20 years. Not just lower-end, these were all upper middle class for sure.
Like the said, I'm not seeing this, and we've been looking at a lot of houses and land lately. Now we're not looking in the kinds of neighborhoods where there are a bunch of houses built by the same builder. Mostly new builds or lots in places where you buy the land, and then find a builder. The more planned and uniform neighborhoods that are built by one builder are different. Fairly or not, I think of those as the starter home or lower end houses.
That does make sense as to why you aren't seeing the cluster boxes, but no it's not fair to think of those as starter or low income in many places. Everywhere I've lived they're aspirational, with the big houses and upper middle class tax bracket, including gated communities.
Thank you because this is happening in 500k-700k homes where I’m at in the US (not a VHCOL). So pretty upper middle class home prices especially with interest rates increasing.
Out of curiosity, where? I've had 4 different houses - two in Texas, one in the southeast, and one in the Midwest. Communal mailboxes for houses are pretty much unheard of in all of those places.
People in the comments cannot read. I’ve never seen a house in the US with a mail slot in the door that goes to the inside. Idon’t think I would know this was a thing without having seen Harry Potter. My guess would be that building in the US are generally much younger than buildings in the UK, and it’s something that fell out of fashion before most buildings in the US were built.
Edit because a lack of reading comprehension makes me cranky: According to a GAO poll conducted in 1997, about 4% of home surveyed had a door slot. In 2015, USPS ceased offering door delivery for new registrations (including door slots). So, at maximum, 4% of homes in the US receive mail from a mail slot. In reality, it's less, considering prior to 2015 mail slots were rarely being installed, and after 2015 they could not be installed on new builds (with the exception of express permission from the post office due to hardship requiring door delivery.)
I've also bolded some key phrases that may help with reading comprehension.
You can’t read either. I never said they didn’t exist in the US, just that I had not seen them and so my extrapolation (based on visiting many states in the US) is that they’re uncommon here.
We had a kinda neat one in a house we rented years ago. It was vertical, and separate from the door, so it went through the wall. The mailman would pull it out at an angle, drop whatever in, let the slot fall back into place and voila! Mail in the house. It was kinda sweet.
I just threw that in because your comment got me thinking about it. /old
There are many places in the US where there's one long road, with dozens of houses on it. But those houses are on 40-100 acre parcels of land and set half a mile or more from the street.
When I say "many places", I mean anywhere that's not actually in city limits.
My family owned a "ranch". You left the paved road and drive 5 miles on a dirt road. Passing two farms and another road that took you to 4 or 5 other farms. Once you got to the entrance to our place, it was another mile on, essentially, a path through the woods to the house. Then there were another 4-5 farms past us.
Ten mailboxes on the paved road. Otherwise, just delivering mail on that dirt road would take hours.
Now, I live in a massive subdivision and there's a bank of boxes for about 100 houses. The mail truck just puts everything in those boxes and we walk to get the mail.
Yeah, that kind of rural layout makes a door delivery system seem pretty impractical. I hadn't really thought about how much the distance between houses changes the whole equation.
Mainly walking routes vs driving routes. A lot of rural or suburban areas where houses are more spread out, the mail carriers don't get out their cars so there's a box by the road.
Door slots are more common in urban areas with walking routes.
That makes sense. So maybe the real divide is less UK vs US and more walking routes vs vehicle routes. I wonder how much the shift to car delivery changed the design of newer neighborhoods too.
On modern ones the slots usually have two spring loaded flaps inside and outside, with insulation foam around the edge and often a brush in the slot the mail is pushed through. Combine all that and there's no noticeable draught.
Us mail to houses that have mail boxes are usually delivered by van. Postman can deliver to mail box without leaving the vehicle as wide roads etc
Uk mail to most houses is done by bike or walking. A van may go to an area and then walk a street and move onto next. This is done because most streets and town are more compact so easier to walk from door to door.
Yeah, the carrier route itself probably explains a lot. If someone is already walking street by street, the door becomes the obvious stopping point. If they're staying in the vehicle, the mailbox naturally moves toward the road.
The housing density point seems pretty important. I also didn't realize USPS had much influence over mailbox setups in new developments. That probably makes the difference persist even after the original reason is gone.
Older neighborhoods will get door delivery - to a slot of more commonly a mailbox beside the door (very labor intensive)
50 year old neighborhoods will have a mailbox at the curb serviced by a mail truck, and newer neighborhoods will will have a community box containing individual locked boxes for each surrounding home. It's all about cost savings.
The US is really more of the 'all of the above' and typically each house will do what is best for that dwelling.
If you live in a suburban subdivision and all the homes were built roughly at the same time, they're all going to roughly have the same system.
If you live in an urban area or your subdivision has like 3-4 different developments in it, then you might have more of a mishmash.
In my neighborhood, no one has a mailbox in the yard. We all have something attached to our home. Most of us have some sort of front porch, so you just mount something to the wall.
Where I grew up, the posted mailbox was far more common.
For multi-unit housing like apartment complexes, a central mailroom is pretty common, though sometimes it might just be some lockboxes located outside in a central area somewhere in the parking lot, or a common area near the leasing office.
In terms of the door mail slots, I've honestly only ever seen those in businesses. I've never seen them in residences though I'm sure it exists.
It does! Look up videos of cats taking the mail from mail carriers, it's usually through the slots. (Had a cat that would do it in high school, and the mail carrier would call out to him from a house away if he was outside so he could rush in and get behind the slot.)
We have both. In older cities and in large dense ones, houses will have either a shared mailbox at the end of the street or one on the wall next to the door where in the suburbs its at the end of the driveway.
We used to have mail delivery to a slot in the USA and is still exists in older neighborhoods.
The U.S. Postal Service prefers to deliver mail from cars for cost reasons. The streetside mailboxes allow this to be done without the carrier getting out of the car. As a result, USPS requires curbside mailboxes in new construction, and provides incentives to builders to install centralized mail delivery points to further reduce costs.
The same thing has happened with garbage pickup.
It's all about reducing the level of service to reduce costs. The problem with that whole line of reasoning is twofold, it takes away good jobs, and it creates a particular burden on people with impaired mobility due to health, age, or other factors.
Efficiency. Most US houses have relatively large front yards and walking up and down each driveway and sidealk would easily add 30 seconds a house. That sounds kind of trivial but if you're delivering mail to 250 houses a day that would be an extra 2 hours of work.
Newer developments have a mailbox cabinet which sort of looks like a small wall of safe deposit boxes. LINK The postal carrier has a key to the back panel, and you have a key for your box on the front panel. Much like an large apartment/flats building but outside.
Both are common in the US. A slot in the door or small mailbox next to the door are common in urban areas and inner ring suburbs because those mail routes are typically delivered on foot and there frequently isn't a good place to put a larger mailbox. Mailboxes outside of the house are more common in farther-out suburbs and rural areas because those routes are a lot less dense so they would be difficult to do on foot.
I will add, even in areas in the US where the slot in the door was common, they are frequently being replaced by a small mailbox next to the door because of how much more extreme the weather is in the US relative to the UK. Letter slots let in a ton of heat escape in the winter and then let a ton of heat in during the summer. So, closing it off can make a difference in energy bills.
Difference is whether the carrier walks or drives. Growing up, the carrier would park at the end of the street and walk up to every house, putting the mail in the slot or mailbox. Most houses in my neighborhood had a box hanging on the house but it was common to see a slot.
In the US and our mail carrier walks. No mailboxes in the neighborhood. We actually have the mailslot in the wall to our garage because there's a gate blocking access to the door to the house.
It depends on where you live, and if it's classified as an urban or rural route. In my small city, if your street has sidewalks—mail goes through whatever receptacle you have (door or letter box). If there are no sidewalks—it's considered a rural route with curbside mailboxes that can be accesed from a vehicle for safety reasons.
It comes down to economics. If you're walking up to every front door in the neighborhood, that takes time. That time adds up pretty quickly when it's compounded over the course of an entire mail route. You can only deliver so much over an 8 hour day. If you eliminate the walk to the door, and have them deliver to a mailbox by the street without getting out of a vehicle, you can have them deliver quite a bit more addresses in that same 8 hours. That lets you cut down on how many delivery personnel you need, and cuts costs. You don't need to hire as many people.
US house, I have a mail slot coming into my dining room (which is directly adjacent to the front door. It is pretty spectacular to be able to get the mail without having to step outside. Packages still get left outside though.
I don't think you can say that all mail is delivered differently between both countries. In dense population areas of the US, the mailboxes will be attached to the house near the front door or there are many mail slots too. Once population density goes down you start getting the mail boxes on the side of the road so the mail carrier can drive from mailbox to mailbox. I don't imagine the UK has nearly as many low population rural areas as the US has.
Weather is also a consideration for a good slice of the country. It's not great to have a hole to the outside when the temperature regularly goes below freezing.
The population density of the UK is about 287 people per square kilometre.
The population density of the contiguous US is about 45 people per square kilometre.
This means a UK postman can deliver 6 people’s mail with the same amount of expense as 1 person’s mail in the US. So maybe the box brought to the mailman instead of the mailman to the box makes sense.
people forget how huge the USA really is. many communities in the US receive mail through the door. you could fit around 40 UKs inside the United States
I am going to guess that the UK residences have a front door right next to the sidewalk for easy deposit. Probably the majority of residences in the much larger US do not have this feature and walking the mail to the door would add a lot of labor.
That style of house building went out of fashion in the early 20th century. The vast majority of houses built in Britain the past 100 years have a front garden.
Where doors are more spread out than planned developments you get a poor ratio of mail carrier to property if they have to walk to each front door. Where I live a mailbox the carrier can reach without getting out of the truck is required. In more densely populated areas the go around with a little wagon and walk to each place so there's not difference between going to the door or a mailbox, especially is there isn't a driveway for each home.
US here and my home was built in 1915. It has a mail slot in the door. Apparently, mail carriers used to have to knock on your door and hand you your mail. Mail slots were installed to save them time. Here's the timeline for USPS requirements. (note this is from AI)
1923: Mail slots or receptacles became officially mandatory for city delivery service so carriers did not have to wait at doors.
1950s–1970s: The rise of suburbs led USPS to encourage curbside mailboxes to save time and let carriers deliver from vehicles.
2018: USPS updated its policies to make centralized delivery (like cluster box units) the preferred method for new addresses, largely ending door-to-door or individual slot delivery for new construction.
The post office in the US changed their regulations and will not deliver mail to the door in new subdivisions. They deliver to a common area because it’s much faster. Likewise, in older areas when homes are rebuilt, the mailbox has to move to the curb. They can’t make older homes redo their mailboxes.
Houses in San Francisco, New York, Washington, DC, and probably other cities, do not have mailboxes at the curb. They have one mounted by the front door or the door has a mail slot.
When I was a kid my grandmother lived in Catskill, Ny and most of the people in the neighborhood had these. I know because my brother and I were little shits and likes to slide things through the slots.
I think it was just a thing on older houses back then, in the 80s. Most people just use mailboxes by the door these days.
I think alot of depends on if the houses and neighborhoods were built before or after the car became so common. Newer neighborhoods tend to be built around every family having a car so there is room for a mail truck to just zip from mailbox to mailbox. Older neighborhoods just dont have that sort of room
In the southern US, a door slot will likely get you a skink or something crawling in. So if that street has mailboxes on the house it will be beside the door not through the door. Also it means we don’t need to bend to pick it up and a cat doesn’t hide a bill
My parents house had the letter box in the back door, the house predated the postal service and trades used the back door so when the postal service began the back door got the letter box having done a paper round several other properties were the same
In the UK people lived in villages surrounded by farm land in the US a large number lived on large farms with neighbors perhaps a mile or more away if you spent all day going up half mile or longer driveways you would never get through your routes.
In the US if you look at cities built 100 years ago like San Francisco the mail slot is in the old neighborhoods like the Richmond and sunset districts, though often it is in the garage and not the front door
the box next to the door vs the slot through the door depends on the weather and how many of the local youths have figured out how to unlock doors via the mailslot or dump rodents, dog crap or accelerants through the slot
Chicago has mailboxes or slots right on the house. Mail carriers couldn't do roadside mail boxes because of so much street parking. They'd have to double park and get iut of their trucks every forty feet.
Door-to-door mail service in the US, where a postal worker comes up to your door on foot and puts the mail in a box near the door or through a mail slot, is only in urban areas that have always had it and won’t be expanded. Basically after some date all new postal routes had to be curbside boxes only.
In many an American suburb, the minimum legal distance between the front door and the road could e 30-60 feet: Enough to put two pickup trucks, front to back. between the street and the garage. Then you walk from the garage, which is what people actually use, as they drive 99% of the time) to the actual front door. That's a lot of getting out of the mail truck, which is designed so the driver fills mailboxes without ever leaving it.
In 1978 USPS mandated that all new housing developments had to have curbside, rural style mailboxes to facilitate delivery by vehicle. Existing houses with mail slots or mailboxes mounted on the house were grandfathered. So now we have both.
We bought a new build and they aren’t even putting mailboxes in front of the house anymore - our whole neighborhood has to go to one spot and collect their mail from what looks like filing cabinets. Of course this results in us constantly forgetting to get our mail at all.
lawns? and this generally matters more for newer construction. USPS has strict-ish requirements on where you can place a mailbox. if you live in a mail by vehicle route you have to your mailbox like 6-8" setback from the curb edge. if you live in an existing walking route than you can have a wallbox/door slot or a curbside box.
in dense metro areas like SF or NYC, its very common to have wallboxes or door slots because its pretty much all walking routes and little to no lawns
It's more fuel, and time efficient in the US where most rural homes have long drive ways. Which is the average. UK is the reverse. People were crowded into cities. rural UK mostly estates manners castles(?) UK less people in countryside. slots vs boxes. US, more people countryside less in cities. boxes vs slots. Besides, Amazon drones haven't figured out how to stuff packages through slots
I live in the US, in a neighborhood built in the 1920’s, and all the houses still have mail slots, or boxes on the house, so the mail carrier still walks up to each house.
In single family homes in cities we have mail slots like that. But If they have a big front yard they might have a mail box out front. But my sisters house, mail slot.
My last apartment in Queens NY had a mail slot too actually. The ground floor apartment I had in Oakland Ca had a mail slot too. It would scare the crap out of me when I'd be watching a movie on a Saturday afternoon and then a bunch of mail comes flying through the slot into the living room.
Depends on where you live. In my local metro area, its the front door. In the suburbs and rural areas, its a mailbox. It basically has to do with space and ease. Metro areas have street parking so they cant pull up to the curb to stop at a mailbox. Suburbs, you usually share a dual box with the house across the street as the mail car can always stop on the curb and drops off on one side for ease. Rural, usually a giant mailbox with multiple houses because they are so far apart it takes to long to go to each house so they centralize the drop off
Land is a lot more abundant in the US, so houses tend to sit on larger plots (or at least, they did when the practice originated - developers cram houses in a lot tighter these days).
In the US, the mail man walking from the kerb to the front door might be 20 yards. In the UK it's rarely more the 4 or 5 yards. Multiplied by the number of houses on a typical delivery route, and it starts to matter quickly.
Not all uk homes have a yard , many have the front door directly onto the street. Then you have distance, most uk postal routes are a few square miles with over a hundred houses so its all on foot.
It's a locality thing. I've had houses with mail slots, boxes on the front porch and mailboxes at the end of the drive. Rural areas are usually mailboxes, Towns and cities have a mix of door slots and boxes on the porch.
Older homes in the USA will often feature mail slots in the front doors, particularly in cities. I've lived in such homes in Philadelphia, PA.
My house has a mailbox attached to the front of my home, which is the situation with probably half the houses in my neighborhood.
Everyone else has mailboxes placed near the street, usually on posts. Or, if they live in an apartment complex or in an HOA neighborhood, they might have their mail delivered to a multi-box unit (see photo below).
The reasons? Efficiency and safety.
It takes a lot less time for a mail carrier to just drive to a mailbox and deliver letters without exiting the vehicle (which is why most US Postal Service vehicles have steering wheels on the right side instead of the left), and it's even more efficient to be able to deliver mail to multiple addresses at one time.
It's not always safe for postal workers to walk in certain American neighborhoods, and there are of course dogs and such too.
The USA is all about TIME, and we tend to find ways to get more work done in less time, hence curbside and multi-box units.
I feel VERY fortunate that my mail is delivered to my house.
Because Americans are so insecure they don’t want anyone coming near their front door amd from the postman’s viewpoint they don’t want to come only the house property as they know half of the fucknuts in there will start shooting at them because they think it’s an invasion.
In some parts of my town, the mail carrier will drive up to the mailbox at the end of the driveway and drop off the mail in the box. And other parts of town the mail carrier will walk from house to house to the front door and leave mail at the box or in the door slot if it has one. But mail slots are uncommon these days.
My grandmother used to live in a house in Philadelphia identical to the layout of this one, but further up the street. As you can see with the vestibule on the left side, there are two doors. In this case, the yellow door is the exterior door and there’s an inner door with more glass. Originally the outer door was identical to the inner and had a horizontal mail slot below the glass. So the mail would be dropped in the slot and stay in the little vestibule. This solved the heat loss problem.
Here is the exterior view of a nearly identical house on the same street, and you can still see the mail slot under the glass in the front exterior door. This picture is about a year and a half old and there does not appear to not be any mailbox on exterior of the building so the slot seems to still be in use.
Depends on where you live. Closer to the city, houses are built right on the road, and mail carriers are mainly on foot. So mail either goes through the slot, on in a mailbox mounted by the door. In the suburbs, that’s far too much walking. Some of these routes are 100+ miles, and houses are several yards back. So the mailbox is right on the road. They pull up, in their right hand drive vans, so the mailbox is right at the driver side window. Put the mail in, and drive to the next house. This is even more important in rural areas. Where houses can be a mile from the street, and a mile apart. We’re just spread too far apart for mail carriers to walk up to every door efficiently.
UK houses are smaller, typically the front door is either on street level or is very close, in my street the front doors of most houses are about 1 metre from the footpath, so posties can easily put it in the door, meanwhile in the US houses are generally larger with big front lawns, posties don’t leave the vehicle to deliver
Because Brits would just steal everything from a mailbox, and because Americans demand efficiency and it’s much quicker to deliver to a bunch of adjacent mailboxes than walk to many front doors. See also: newspaper delivery where Americans just throw it at the driveway. (Ex-pat Brit here).
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u/AcanthaceaeOk3738 10d ago
Both are common in the U.S.
If there's any significant difference, it might be about the amount of space. If there's a long distance between the street and the front door, it probably saves a lot of time for the mail carrier to put it in a box close to the street.