I've discovered that the mail carriers can leave the mail on the ground rather than in the mailbox. As Veronaville postman Armando Turner did today when delivering mail to Herbert F. Foster's residence in Monopolis by Veronaville.
Herbert was just leaving for work at the time Armando was delivering the mail, so maybe the postman felt safer not stepping onto the road, as Herbert (having missed his carpool) was riding a bicycle for the very first time in his life.

We don't have those American-style mailboxes in the UK, but I'm surprised that the ones in The Sims 2 are invariably placed with the opening end facing towards the road, so that to open them, Sims have to stand in the road. It would seem to me to be much safer and more sensible if they faced the other way. So that the mail carrier could do their job while staying on the sidewalk. I presume that real life American mailboxes, face the same way as the Sims' ones? But I wonder why they face that way.

You know despite the game being made in America I had never considered those mailboxes "American-style". Every house I've ever seen has the mailbox next to the front door, where it belongs. Who wants to trudge all the way down the driveway in the middle of winter just to get the mail? Standalone mailboxes like that are really only out in the country where your driveway could be half a mile long or more and the mail carrier doesn't have time to go all the way up to every single house.

I think the US mailboxes have the positions mandated by the USPS, so that the mail man can deliver them efficiently from a vehicle. I remember hearing that in some areas, the mailboxes are all on one side of the road? Maybe someone from the US can give more detail! Of course, Sims 2 mail men precede Sims 2 cars, so that would explain why they walk to lots. And also the Sims 2 mailbox is used as a marker for where pedestrians aim for when they walk past, and affects the cinematic cutscenes too (hilarity ensues if you stick the mailbox close to the house for taxi cutscenes)

There's a lot of different ways for mailboxes to be set up. The "mailboxes all on the same side of the street" is generally for rural areas where a number of households have driveways accessing the road (a state highway or a farm-to-market road) around that point. Generally they are not only all on the same side of the road, but clustered together on the shoulder or a small side lane or pullover space, so that the deliveryperson can do several addresses at once. When my mother moved into a manufactured home on my sister's property they put a second mailbox at the end the driveway on top of the original, but usually they're side by side at a standard height. A friend of ours who lives in a newish subdivision has the equivalent of the apartment mailbox in the game, a set of lockboxes with slots near the entrance to the subdivision, only accessible with the key issued to the owner of teh address associated with the box; a system more common in apartment complexes and business parks. I have seen subdivisions which had mailboxes right at the curb (and blocking the sidewalk; very much against the Americans with Disability Act but there is a certain kind of American developer who won't care about that sort of thing until somebody sues them, and the sorts of people who live in these subdivisions never walk anywhere; the sidewalks are usually pretty pathetic even between the mailboxes) and the mailman would deliver from his vehicle during his route, and the resident would retrieve the mail from their vehicle when leaving or returning from the house. I have also seen neighborhoods with traditional mailboxes like those in the game set up, usually mounted on a fencepost, right where the private access sidewalk to the house met the public right-of-way of the city sidewalk. We did that for awhile when we had our porch replaced, but normally, in our neighborhood, there's either a mail slot or a flat, rectangular mailbox mounted by the door and the mailman parks at a central location and walks up one side of the street and down the other within a certain radius of the car, then drives on another couple of blocks and does it again.

So the developers went with a familiar mailbox shape and the flag system and set it up in a way that was "good enough" for the game.

I live in Jacksonville Florida (where it rarely snows). Florida is the only state that does not have mountain range. n our city alone, in rural neighborhoods the mail boxes is placed at the end of the driveway. But the closer the neighborhood gets to Downtown, the mail boxes are locate to the left of the front door, making the mailman to walk his route and free up the road for traffic,

And out in the country where there are farms, orchards, and vineyards they are place on the same side of the road.

(Not US) Most of my neighborhood has mailboxes from several houses bunched together on a stand (there are several of them around the hood, they're quite common in areas with lots of houses). Probably to make things easier for the mail carriers, since there are a lot of small one-lane roads that lead to the houses (they drive around, would take ages if they had to go to each house, but this way they can drop off mail to maybe 5-10+ houses per stop). Most of the mail stands are close-ish to each house, but I think most have to walk a few meters (maybe 25m in my case, past a few houses - not even close to the driveway).

The mailboxes we've got look like large metal boxes with lids at the top. The front is slightly bigger than an A4 sheet of paper (a bit larger than a newspaper folded in two).

I don't think I've seen a single mailbox here that looks like the ones in TS2 (apartment mailboxes can look somewhat like the ones from TS3, but that's about as close as it gets). We've also never had the posting option (red flag thing) for the mailboxes. You either have to go to a place that has post office functions, or put the mail in official mail boxes (often found near grocery shops/malls/etc.). Not sure if various package services have pick-up options, though.

Absolutley wouldn't mind having this mailbox style as an option ingame. I've seen a few deco ones that were close but not quite.

We recently ha to get a new stand for the mailboxes - the one we had was really old and threatened to fall over onto the neighbor's lawn. At the end, trying to get to the mail was bordering on dangerous. Risked ending up falling over along with the entire stand.

This is exactly what mailboxes look like in pretty much every place I've ever lived. I am American and live in the Southern US and have always lived in a rural or small town area (not urban). Right now, I live in a suburban-style neighborhood. The mailboxes all have to be the same height and at the same placement relevant to the road, and the mail carrier delivers the mail from their vehicle. The flag is on the mailbox so you can signal that you left something in the mailbox for the mail carrier to pick up. In the US, our steering wheels are on the left side of the car but postal trucks have steering wheels on the right so they can just pull up next to the mailbox and pop the mail in. If you are driving on a rural road with a lot of blind curves, it can be a little frustrating to get behind the mail carrier.

(BTW, there are no sidewalks in my neighborhood, but people do walk. We just walk in the road.)

In the first house I lived in, which was on a dirt road, I remember the mailboxes were at the end of the driveway we shared with our neighbors, but they faced the driveway, not the road. Presumably, the mail carrier turned around in our driveway--which I think at the time was the farthest down the road--and delivered the mail before going back the other way. I remember one time I was riding my bike down the hill in front of our house and I didn't judge the turn into the driveway right and crashed right into the mailbox. Really banged myself up.

Our letterboxes usually look more like the ones in the attached pictures and are at the end of the driveway, but with the footpath and grass verge between them and the road. Our posties used to use bicycles, but now they use these weird golf cart things. We don't have the red flags on letterboxes, either. I presumed that those were for letting the postie know if there was mail in the box to be taken away?

I should warn you, however, that certain types of letterbox can be very dangerous.

For example:

Rural West, only thing weird about Sims 2 mail delivery is that it's done on foot!

Actually, the in-town boxes tend to be the door slots (see the lovely cat above shredding mail and mailmen) and they have sidewalks.

We're supposed to set the post at 45 inches from edge of asphalt, and to clear the shoulder in front of the box so the mailman can reach it from his/her window. (I recently looked this up because our post died to snowplow last winter, and it's more like five inches from asphalt, as the county didn't move it when they added shoulders to the road a decade or so back.) Mailman is happy with it closer to the road, so . . . it's staying where it is.

Here in England, the Royal Mail postman delivers to our door- they post letters through the letterbox (sometimes there are cats or dogs as in Charity's picture ) and parcels they leave on the doorstep or knock to hand deliver to us, depending on the type of delivery chosen by the sender.


If we want to send a letter or a parcel, we can either post them at a postbox (always red; always with the cypher of the reigning monarch at the time of installation); take them to a post office, or arrange for parcel collection at the door by booking online.


So we have to do most of the the legwork to send a letter; but the postman does the legwork to deliver the letter. It's a nice system I think; too bad it's struggling at the moment due to budget cuts and understaffing blah blah blah (the same as every good thing these days ). I hope our sims don't have these worries! The same postman has been delivering in Lacuna Delta for several generations now with no signs of retirement on the horizon!

Our public post boxes are slowly disappearing. When I was a kid there was one outside our local dairy, one on the way to school, one at the post office, one outside another dairy, ... They're all gone now (and the post office has closed down).

Oh yeah, ours switched a couple years ago from "door you can open and drop packages into" to "tiny slot for only letters". Which is annoying as hell if you're, say, my mom, who sells handmade jewelry online and needs to ship it.

Package shipping here in Latvia has been taken over by various companies. It seems like they would cut into each other's narrow profits. There are automated postage cabinets. I open a door to place a parcel inside, or use a secret number to get my delivery from one of the doors. Usually places have 3 of these side by side. The state mail company has a slot for letters there.

Letters are rarely sent at all. No bills. Official letters from government relating to a court, taxes, elections or from a city council are still sent. Newspaper subscription still exists, but is rarely used. It is subsidized by the state because it is not economical to deliver newspapers in the countryside.

I spoke about it some months ago and people thought I was in the wrong for thinking the mailbox was misplaced. I think it should be consistent with how mail works in the game, not America. I always move the mailbox and trash can to declutter the roadside and make it more familiar looking. Occasionally they can't disembark a car without stepping through the mailbox or trashcan. Some walkers without mods aim to a slot behind the mailbox to stand on the sidewalk as they congregate at the mailbox for waiting. So now they stand on the grass. But if there is a fence behind the mailbox, they will still stand somewhere reasonable.

Seems that mailboxes and trash cans are not universally by the roadside anymore in America according to this discussion thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmeri...r_mailboxes_at/

One person from Michigan writes, "Trash cans and recycling cannot be visible from the road, so most people have them at the top of their driveway behind a little enclosure fence.."

I had a lot (one lot only) where the mailbox broke, and I didn't find the root cause of it. Somehow a second mailbox was created out of world, and the mailman would unsuccessfully try to walk to it, and then drop bills in the corner of the lot whrere they became red. I put a breakpoint on creation of a mailbox, but didn't catch what created it.

Residential postal boxes here is kind of like those in Sims 2, but facing the other way around. They are on the pavement and kind of in the center of the front of the house. (That is probably why I never move them when I build, they look very normal to me).

No deliveries at doors.

The Post Office is in ICU and the government made a law that all packages that weigh less than 1kg have to be sent by the post office. The law came about because nobody used the post office to send packages and I don't think it is that hard to add a little weight to a package if you really want to.

Many apartment complexes don't have any postal boxes at all. Drop it at security at the gate. You can rent a post box at some post offices and some private firms.

Here and there, one can still find a red postal box from when SA was colonized by Britain; I don't think they have ever been used for packages - if you want to send a package via the post office, you need to visit it in person to send it (or pick one up if somebody sends you one).

I don't quite understand this. Don't all packages go through the post office?

I think most packages here go through UPS or FedEx, rather than the post office. Amazon has their own delivery system, too.

We have a variety of private companies here who will pick up your package at your house and deliver it straight to the next house. They are popular.

I live in South Africa, nothing has to go through the post office, except packages that weigh less than 1kg.

There are big companies like "DPD" with large coverage who have replaced the post office. They have also outcompeted "UPS" and "DHL" for small deliveries. Now the post office has caught up and also put out automated cabinets. Previously you had to go to the office and show an ID card after they put a slip of paper in the mailbox, which could be missed. If I order a delivery, I can usually choose a delivery channel or they pick it (Aliexpress). It was a bad day if they picked the post office. The post office does more thorough scanning of the contents with X-ray and dogs, and also takes significantly longer. Maybe 20 days instead of 4 to 5 days of "DPD". With "UPS" you had to be on site and also show an ID card. But at least they notified via SMS instead of a slip of paper.

I just had to see this for myself. . .

Veronaville Taxis pride themselves on giving door-to-door service. I don't know what it does to the flowers in that flowerbed in front of the house though.

This was the scene today when Harris Maclean and is son Remus moved into their new house at 72 Bow Street in Monopolis. I've since moved the mailbox nearer to the front street!