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What is Postcrossing?

Postcrossing is a free postcard exchange website that allows people to exchange cards with other project members. It was created in 2005 by Paulo Magalhães, a Portuguese student, as a side project. What started as a hobby grew into a worldwide project with more than 800 000 members who've exchanged over 70 million postcards over the years.

The way it works is pretty straightforward: you get a random person's address, then another random person gets yours, and so on. The person you send to and the person who sends to you are always two different people, and you can never get the same address twice. You can also do direct swaps - an "unofficial" exchange where you contact another member directly and ask if they are down for it. Oh, and there's also an official forum (we all love a forum, don't we?) that offers different ways to spice up your postcard sending!

Stats:


Members: 804 000+
Countries: 209
Top-5 countries with the most members:
  1. Russia (14.2%) (that's me! i'm from here!)
  2. Taiwan (13.5%)
  3. USA (9.3%)
  4. China (9.0%)
  5. Germany (7.4%)

Total amount of postcards sent: 73 280 000+
Distance travelled: 370+ billion km - that's more than 481 thousand return trips to the moon!
Top-5 countries with the most amount of sent postcards:
  1. Germany (17.2%)
  2. USA (12.2%)
  3. Russia (11.7%)
  4. Netherlands (7.1%)
  5. Finland (5.8%)

(as of September 2023)

Getting started

Step 1: create an account and provide your address (which won't be available publicly and will only be sent to the users you were randomly matched with by the system)
Step 2: draw the addresses! There is a limit to how many travelling postcards you are allowed to have at a time. Brand new users are able to draw five addresses. Every postcard has its own unique Postcard ID, which you have to write on the card before you send it so that the recipient could register it on the website.
Step 3: choose and write the postcards! Most people have their profile filled out with basic information about themselves and/or their postcard preferences, which can be very helpful. Don't forget the Postcard ID!
Step 4: send the cards!
Step 5: wait for the first card you sent to arrive to its destination. You will know it arrived when the recipient registers it on the Postcrossing website (you will get notified via e-mail). NB: the website provides an optional field for a thank you message during the registration process, and it's customary to never leave it empty. So you'll get a little thank you message as well!
Step 6: once the first postcard you've sent arrives, you finally become eligible to receive a card yourself! A random user will get your address and do the same process you did when you were sending your cards. Now you need to wait some more :D
Step 7: hurray! You found a card in your mailbox! Now you need to register it using the Postcard ID and thank the sender :)
Step 8-infinity: repeat this for however long you want! Every time a card you sent arrives to its recipient, a free slot opens in your Travelling cards section so you can draw more addresses. The more cards you send, the more you will receive and the more you will be able to send at a time. After you've sent your first 5 cards, your limit starts increasing.

My Postcrossing story

September 2023
I can't remember where I first heard about Postcrossing from, but I'd known of it way before I actually got into it. Back then, I would occasionally swap mail with my international friends, but that was it. Then, in January 2020, I saw a really cozy-looking ad for a small online postcard shop on Instagram, and something clicked. I created a Postcrossing profile shortly after. It's been almost four years, and I'm still going strong! I take breaks sometimes to avoid getting burnt out, but I always come back to this hobby. I like physical objects, I love collecting them; I like things that carry the warmth of another person's hands. I like knowing that a stranger took their time to choose a card for me, sign it and often even decorate it. And I love doing the same for other people!
My Kind Reader
World Wide Web

CODE BY TESSISAMESS

The stats of my personal account aren't very exciting: the most frequent countries that have sent me cards are Russia and Germany, and the most frequent countries I've sent to are Germany and Russia :D (almost equal percentage in both cases, too) That's fairly normal for Postcrossing, since these countries are among the most active ones, but it makes it pretty exciting to receive cards from somewhere else! I haven't, however, received anything from a particularly rare country yet - though there's no single approved definition of a rare country in Postcrossing, there are countries with low amount of members and/or sent cards which would probably be universally accepted as rare. The rarest country I've received a card from so far is Algeria! That's the card there on the left! It's not the rarest country, but it's not a very common one either; at the moment there are only 169 registered users from Algeria (compare that to 114 THOUSAND of Russian users). And one of them pulled my address from the system! Isn't that cool?

UPD 04.02.24: I can now say that I've at least sent to an actual rare country! I got the address of a guy in Laos a couple of months ago - that's one of the FIVE users from that country registered on Postcrossing! The card didn't get lost and actually arrived, too. Exciting stuff!

More small things I like about my card hobby:

I'm a bit of a hermit, and one of the things I love most about Postcrossing is that it requires just the right amount of human contact for me :D I don't have to interact with anyone directly, but I still feel connected to people via postcards, especially when I can tell they really read through my profile and made an effort.
However, Postcrossing can be a social hobby if you want it to be! In-person and online meet-ups are organized constantly, and I've been to a couple of them. 'Twas fun, but nothing beats a nice and quiet card-writing session in my apartment.
I love reading through people's profiles, learning about their preferences and going through their received postcards to help me select a perfect card. Some find it restrictive when people have a list of card motifs they like on their profile, but I love it and think it's very helpful. It's nice when people upload pictures of the cards they received, too, so I know which cards I shouldn't send.
Going through my postcard stash looking for suitable cards is almost therapeutic for me ♥
I absolutely love it when kids write to me! There's a good many people who share this hobby with their kids, and I just love to see it.
There are many ways to use the Postcrossing forum for some variety: there are Round Robins where users are separated into groups and send each other cards with a particular theme (before the war I participated in a lighthouse-themed one); there are chaincards, travelling notebooks and probably lots of other stuff I'm forgetting.
Postcrossing, of course, isn't the only card-sending site/community on the internet, and there are plenty of alternatives! I love r/RandomActsofCards, it adds a nice variety to my normal card-sending because this subreddit is more welcoming of folded cards and handmade cards.

World Postcard Day

In 2019 the Postcrossing team organized a worldwide celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first ever postcard being sent. It went so well that October 1st was declared World Postcard Day, with special events held all over the world and a new official WPD postcard design every year! The easiest way to celebrate it is by sending literally any postcard to literally anyone you want :D I try to do that every year since 2021. There are more ideas on the project's website that may not be immediately obvious to everyone, too.

Mail-themed media

(feel free to send more recs!)
= favorites; no notes = haven't tried it yet

Games

  • Lake - a Hallmark movie in the form of a game (affectionate) where you come back to your hometown to deliver mail while your father, the local postman, is on vacation. Drive around, meet the locals, romance a woman. A perfect game.
  • Mail Time - I only played the demo because I'm not the biggest fan of platformers, but this game is super cute and cozy!
  • Letters: A Written Adventure
  • Thousand Threads (recommended by Loren)
  • Every Letter [free!]
  • Over the Alps - a gorgeous narrative game about a spy in Switzerland on the brink of WW2 (think 1930s Hitchcock films). The plot has nothing to do with mail, but the story is told through interactive postcards + achievements look like little stamps!

Shows

  • Lark Rise to Candleford - a BBC costume drama about a MILF postmistress a post office in a British town in the 1890s.

Movies

  • Only Angels Have Wings (1939) - Cary Grant plays a pilot who delivers air mail.
  • The Shop Around the Corner (1940) - one of the first adaptations of the story most of us (I think) know through You've Got Mail. Two employees of the same shop who hate each other fall in love through anonymous correspondence.
  • Klaus (2019) - a beautiful animated Christmas movie about a postman who is sent to a remote town where he has to send 6000 letters in a year to avoid being cut off by his father.
  • Mary and Max (2009)
  • Le Bonheur (1965)

Books

  • The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Alan Bradley) - the main character's father is a philatelist and the plot is driven by a rare Penny Black stamp.
  • The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows)

Postal links

(to be sorted)

Original page code by EGGRAMEN, modified by me. More credits HERE.