this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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You say that, but in the US, if you don't live in an apartment, your letterbox most likely doesn't lock or anything like that either. They may as well just be tossing the mail onto the floor.
I don't know a single person without a locking mailbox
Cool story. I don't know a single person in my area with a letterbox let alone a locking one. It's just not something we have in the more rural areas.
Unless this is a language thing. To me, a letterbox is generally attached to a house, often it's just a slot on the front door. And a mailbox is on a post near the street (and generally they do not lock)
I believe @Willie@kbin.social was using letterbox and mailbox interchangeably.
Yeah, you're correct in that assumption.
I've only really ever heard of the box outside of someone's home being called a postbox or mailbox. Despite the fact that both terms also refer to the box at the post office where you can put outgoing mail, there's just no separate word for them. And I've only ever heard of the slot on the house door where the mail is placed being called a mail slot.
Letterbox is a completely new term to me in this context... and I still am not quite sure what it would mean, if not a mailbox. Haha.
It's an interesting discussion in general... I've lived in 5 states in the US and mail service isn't necessarily the same across all of them even among similar types of neighborhoods...
For example, in Georgia it's common for every house on a rural residential dirt road to have its own individual (non-lockable) USPS mailbox at the end of their dirt driveway.
In Colorado, on the other hand, it's not uncommon for many of those similar rural dirt road neighborhoods to have a communal (locking) mailbox at the entrance to the dirt road neighborhood similar to what most apartment complexes have.
It's also not uncommon in Colorado or even California for some suburban single family home neighborhoods to have similar communal (lockable) mailboxes but that's less common, in my experience, in most Southeastern states.
I've also lived in an old Victorian building with a mail slot but it had been converted to apartments and had a multi unit locking mailbox bolted to the front of the building at that point.
I don't remember if I had a point or not now other than that shit is weird.
You're coming across as an unintelligent pedant right now.
Not really. Letters are generally of a known size so a house-side box is used to receive letters. It's a letterbox. Then mailboxes, which you may note are generally much larger than house-sixe boxes, are intended for more than letters, and are sized as such. They care called mailboxes dur to them holding more than letters/envolopes.
Please explain? After doing some quick googling, it looks like my interpretation is pretty accurate. But again this could be due to localized results. I'm not going to pretend all English speakers use the same words for the same things.
You could drop the hostility though.
The two are used fairly interchangeably, in my experience. Usually someone uses one or the other depending on where they're from.
What's your point? We know there's different infrastructure and protocol for delivery in different areas, which was established in the original comment.
Do you have a residence in every single place on Earth? No? I can tell you that I've never lived in a neighborhood with (outdoor) mailboxes with locks. Does that add anything to the conversation?