physical mail has gotten way more expensive, now 78 cents for a regular letter and $5 for a small package. So it adds up. I probably send a dozen emails a day while sending out maybe 3 envelopes per month, usually stuff like bill payments or business docs, rather than personal letters.
they collect all the metadata now, i.e. photographs of the front and back of the envelope. I try not to write return addresses on envelopes but sometimes it’s necessary and sometimes I forgot to omit it. They do get delivered without the return address, though I don’t have enough samples to say the reliability is any different.
I do wonder whether the mailbox you drop the letter in somehow gets recorded in the metadata. Obviously the originating post office is recorded, but if there are a dozen mailboxes in the neighborhood and some USPS worker empties them out once a day, idk if there’s any effort to separate the letters by what mailbox they came from, or if they all just get dumped into a large bin.
There was supposedly a snail mail remailer network operating in Poland in the 1950s or so. If you were in Minsk and wanted to correspond with your friend in Pinsk without the KGB knowing, you’d instead send your letter to someone in Poland who would then forward it in a different envelope to Pinsk. I believe some samizdat manuscripts also circulated that way.
physical mail has gotten way more expensive, now 78 cents for a regular letter and $5 for a small package. So it adds up. I probably send a dozen emails a day while sending out maybe 3 envelopes per month, usually stuff like bill payments or business docs, rather than personal letters.
they collect all the metadata now, i.e. photographs of the front and back of the envelope. I try not to write return addresses on envelopes but sometimes it’s necessary and sometimes I forgot to omit it. They do get delivered without the return address, though I don’t have enough samples to say the reliability is any different.
I do wonder whether the mailbox you drop the letter in somehow gets recorded in the metadata. Obviously the originating post office is recorded, but if there are a dozen mailboxes in the neighborhood and some USPS worker empties them out once a day, idk if there’s any effort to separate the letters by what mailbox they came from, or if they all just get dumped into a large bin.
There was supposedly a snail mail remailer network operating in Poland in the 1950s or so. If you were in Minsk and wanted to correspond with your friend in Pinsk without the KGB knowing, you’d instead send your letter to someone in Poland who would then forward it in a different envelope to Pinsk. I believe some samizdat manuscripts also circulated that way.