Postcrossing Blog

So, we’ve just spent a few hours putting all of your submitted photos for the birthday contest together in a little video and we have to confess that we are currently feeling a bit teary-eyed… The two-hundred and seventy smiles that we have received from all over the world that have swept us off our feet.

Just look for yourself:

Thank you all, you’re the best! Paulo and I are currently wishing we could make a biiiiiig roadtrip around the world to hug each and every one of you! :)

Paulo’s little random number generator selected the following winners for this contest: Miza, arlene037, Mayalost, Patflash and Angerona. Congratulations, we’ll be in touch to deliver the code for your new pack of 60 MOO postcards!

No luck this time? Don’t worry – we have a new contest coming soon!

PS – Do you subscribe MOO's newsletter? They featured Postcrossing on their newest issue, and offered everybody 15% discount on postcards using the coupon 9MW4J4, until August 15th. Now’s your chance to make some neat postcards :)

Ingrid from Iran makes pottery but this hobby has been superseded by Postcrossing and new collecting activities introduced to her by Postcrossing.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

One day when I was searching the Internet and I found Bookcrossing. I wasn’t that hopeful to find any book in my second home town, Tabriz, so that I could take part in Bookcrossing. I was a bit sad but then I saw the Postcrossing label there and I was curious to see what it meant and if it would be something suitable for me!?!?

It was definitely created for me! This was the beginning of my very beloved new hobby in September 2005. I had already been collecting postcards since my childhood. From that time until my late twenties I was only collecting real vintage cards from around the year 1900 as well as cards from France (my favorite country) and later from Hannover, Hamburg, and Iran! I’ve still in my collection the very first card I ever bought – bought when I was only 10 years old. That first card is from Hameln. Perhaps you know the fairy tale of the famous rattenfaenger?!

Later I moved to Iran and every 3–4 years when I came back with my children for holidays to Germany, I started to buy cards from everywhere we were going for sightseeing. I did the same in Iran! And I even collected all the cards during 34 years which I got from abroad from my friends and relatives. So I already had a good collection when I started with Postcrossing!!!

Since this time I have found so many very nice friends all around the world! I have even taken part in several meetups in Germany, Austria and Finland! And, yes, we are a Postcrossing family: ipuenktchen, I_am_from_hanover, yashila_81, ANITA_2004. And, recently – BREAKING NEWS – yashila_81 got married and his wife for sure is a Postcrosser… hehehe… lili_6789!!! But this is not that Postcrossing marriage as they have known each other for a long time before Paulo had this great idea of Postcrossing. In the end, both are interested in postcards!!!

I have also gotten some of my students involved and addicted…

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I always have my camera with me and adore taking photos. I have been doing so since my last year of high school when I won my first camera in a lottery of a youth magazine. A quite new hobby is that I started a blog for traveling toys called POSSY and CROSSY, a playmo couple: ipuenktchenworld.blogger.de. The blog has nice pictures of Iran as these traveling toys are going with me everywhere! Their god aunt Egni from Switzerland came up with these great nicknames for them.

Also, since 1998 I got involved again with pottery (which I started when I still lived in Germany) but shame on me … Postcrossing is taking up all of my time and I find less time for pottery. But I’m still trying to take part in Iranian pottery biennials and other exhibitions. Here you can have a look at a small homepage: home.feierabend.com/sofalin. I’m also a member of East-Azerbaijan’s Pottery Friends Association.

And please not to be forgotten – traveling is one of my main hobbies!!!

There are other collections I’ve started via Postcrossing: The Little Prince books in different languages – just now I got my 37th version.

Lastly, I also I started a collection of fridge magnets!!!

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

A pic of the Iranian mailboxes which you can find everywhere; but using these is not as common as in other countries. People mostly prefer to mail their stuff at the main post office. It takes me 45 minutes to reach it!!! Here you may have a look at our new mailbox. We changed it recently.

And I finally got a pic of our mailman…

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

Oh, what a difficult question!!! Please let me think about it …

No, it’s impossible to decide as I have thousands and thousands of BEAUTIFUL and INTERESTING postcards!!! The card that touched me most was perhaps the first folded panorama card I had ever seen. It is from New Zealand and was a thank you card from nzmum2000! It was sooo impressive with a beautiful nature view in a large size!!!

Otherwise I have cork postcards, a wooden postcard, even a card with a real leaf from a tree in China! Recently I received from dear isagv the most funny card I ever had: there is a Santa Claus grabbing an Easter Bunny out of his sack and the Easter Bunny has a birthday cake in his paws and there is written “Merry Christmas, Happy Easter and Happy Birthday”! *LOL* But it’s really impossible for me to decide which one is my most favorite card!

By the way, the reason I’m really happy for this hobby: it is for people of any age – I just got an official card from a 71 year old Postcrosser and her husband who is 84. I hope to be able to do the same in future as well!

Last July 14th, was not just the Postcrossing 5th birthday. On the same day, a village in the U.K. was trying to break a Guinness world record: the most postcards sent from one location.

The previous record belonged to the Indian city of Tamilnadu with the already impressive number of 5,216 postcards sent. Not bad at all! But the residents of Keyworth decided they could be better and they aimed for even higher: they are claiming to have sent a total of 8033 postcards in one single day! Quite something, isn’t it?

The event was organized by Brian Lund with the help of the local postoffice staff that started preparing the event 6 months ago, spreading the word and gathering sponsors. Some custom postcard designs were provided and there was even a postmark specific to that event. Postcards were sent all over the world, but some people mail themselves a postcard to keep a memory of participating in the event.

The exact value of the record is currently being submitted for ratification but with 8033 postcards, thinks are looking good – congratulations Keyworth!

PS: Speaking of records, to date the record of postcards sent in a Postcrossing meetup seems to belong to last year International Meetup in Helsinki with 545 postcards, signed (by all participants!) and sent on a single meetup. Do you know of another meetup with a higher number? Let us know!

Anita, a world traveler, joined Postcrossing at the recommendation of a pen pal. She has over thirteen thousand postcards in her collection.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

Because she knew how much I love postcards, my dear pen friend Aase from Denmark told me about Postcrossing in the summer of 2006. So I thought to myself “why not, let’s try it” – and after I found my first postcards in my mailbox it happened to me: I got addicted to Postcrossing.

I have met so many nice people via Postcrossing but also via private swaps and some of them in real life – robin67 and oldieoma from Vienna, Mozartkugel from Salzburg, ipuenktchen from Iran, Karmi from Slovenia, MARCILIA from Madeira/Portugal, Ziah from Mauritius etc.

Honeybee and ipuenktchen


Graz meetup: ipuenktchen, oldieoma and honeybee


Graz meetup: robin67 and honeybee


Salzburg meetup: mozartkugel, ipuenktchen, oldieoma and honeybee


Vienna meetup: oldieoma, honeybee and robin67


honeybee and robin67

Each time I see a postcard stand I have to stop and to look; so my family and friends have to have good nerves and have to be very patient with me.

I think Postcrossing is such a wonderful and peaceful hobby. A Postcrossing friend from Portugal told me once that he want to suggest me for the Nobel Prize for Peace ;) because I helped people from Israel and Iran to exchange postcards (they both sent them to me and I passed them on). There is no postal exchange between them and some other countries of our earth. So I try to help my Postcrossing friends from time to time to realize their postcard-dreams into countries they never would be able to send a card.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I love reading and writing so I am very happy to work for a book publishing house here in Graz.

I also enjoy traveling very much and I have visited many countries: Norway & Svalbard, Finland, UK, Sweden, Germany, Czech Republic, Russia, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, France, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Hungary, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Canada (Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), USA (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Washington State, Oregon, California), Africa (Egypt, Morocco, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe). My next journeys will lead me to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and in summer to Iceland (if the volcano let us go…), Faeroe Islands and Greenland.

Other hobbies: I am fond of playing the keyboard, singing, taking pictures and hiking.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

Honeybee postman

Honeybee postoffice

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

In my collection I have 13,626 postcards and I love each one of them. I received my first card when I was three years old. I got it from my uncle, who died very young, so it is a wonderful reminder of him. My parents kept this card and all the others which arrived for me until I was ten. Then they asked me if I wanted to collect them and from then my postcard collection grew each year.

Of course there are some favourites – as I love map-cards very much and city views for example. You can visit my map-card collections – Europe, the Americas, Pacific Rim and Asia.

On 14th July 2005, the Postcrossing project started its first steps in spreading smiles through postcards. It was a small project done for the love of sending and receiving postcards from all over the world, and the hope was that there would be more people sharing the same love and interest for snail mail.

Fast forward 5 years and this same project is now responsible for over 4.5 million postcards connecting about 200 countries. It binds together people from different cultures of all ages and genders, with different political and even religious beliefs. Few other hobbies can claim to have achieved the same results, and we are quite proud of this!

Throughout these years, Postcrossing has gone through several milestones, thanks to the work of a team of volunteers as well as the precious support of its members who helped it reach what it is now.

Postcrossing is sending out a bold message to the world today: postcards are not something from the past. In fact, we feel like we are starting a postcard revolution and proving that no technology will ever replace the intimacy of a handwritten postcard. :)

Thank you everyone who made this possible. Let’s make the next 5 years even greater!

Please join me wishing,

…aaaaaaand because a birthday is not complete without presents, we have a big contest to announce! :)

We would like you to take a picture of yourself posting some postcards at your local postbox. Why not go do that now, we’ll wait here for a bit… Done? Now mail the photo to this email address, and don’t forget to add your username, so we can know who you are! That was easy, right? We’re hoping to make a big slideshow of smiling postcrossers around the world!

By July 31st we’ll randomly choose 5 people, who will each receive a pack of 60 postcards from MOO. :)

Many of you already know MOO, but if you don’t you should really check them out – they help you to make batches of professional glossy postcards, with a set of your own pictures or using some of their cool ready-made designs. If you’re a postcrosser who has never tried MOO before, you’ll be happy to know that they are offering all new customers 10% off 20 or 60 packs of postcards with the voucher code POSTBIRTHDAY5! (valid for one order only until the end of July, excludes delivery).