Postcrossing Blog

A postcard has been delivered by Britain’s Royal Mail 79 years after it was sent.

The picture postcard was sent in 1929 from Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, and intended for Mr and Mrs Richardson in East Dulwich, London.
However it was not delivered until a week ago when it finally dropped through the letter box of Arthur Davies and June Nicolopoulos after a delay of nearly eight decades.

Mr Davies, 59, a construction manager, said: “I’ve heard of delays but this takes some beating – I reckon it’s been under a skirting board at a Royal Mail building all this time.

”It’s amazing that Royal Mail even delivered it at all after all these years."

The postcard arrived inside a Royal Mail envelope with a sticker reading, “we are sorry that this item has been damaged/delayed in the post”.

From an article on The West Australian, click to continue reading.

Wow! What a great journey this postcard has had! I wonder where that postcard had been hiding… :)

Postcrossing received this wonderful article written by Markus (aspen), who recently interviewed Geoffrey (misterteapot, from Australia) and Kati (kilona, from Finland).
If you haven’t heard the good news yet, Geoffrey and Kati met through Postcrossing, after which they fell in love and got married. They’re now living in Finland. Here’s the story:


Start postcrossing. You might get married

Postcrossing is responsable of this, laughs Geoffrey meaning his marriage with a Finn, Kati. It would not have happened if they both hadn’t been postcrossers. But what are postcrossers? Postcrossing means sending postcards to all over the world. If you send a card to Germany, you might receive one from a Brazilian postcrosser. Why? Because people want to receive real mail. This kind of hobby brought the Reynolds together. “How else could we have met? I can’t think of any other way!” says Geoffrey who has moved to Finland. The couple is crazy about postcards and Geoffrey has to close his eyes everytime there’s a post office or a card shop near. Otherwise he would go shopping.

Thousands of addresses

I have hundreds of addresses of postcrossers tells Kati and shows her black address book. Geoffrey has saved thousands of addresses to his computer. They send cards every here and there just to make other postcrossers happy. You can do postcrossing with smaller contribution also. Geoffrey joined Postcrossing after he had heard of it from his friends. It sounded a fun idea and I was curious. I noticed soon how nice people are! I noticed also how little I know about the world. In the USA some families even teach geography to their children via postcrossing. A genious idea, praises Geoffrey.

Translation done by Soili (soili). For those of you that read Finnish, the original version can be viewed in this scan of the article.

Once again, congratulations Geoffrey and Kati! :)

It’s been a month since Postcrossing launched its’ Supporters program… and it has been a success! We are really grateful to the many people that decided to generously contribute.

So, what is Postcrossing doing with your donations?

Over the time, Postcrossing has grown too big for its current server so the most important short term improvement will be a much needed server upgrade. In addition to increasing the speed of the site, it will also allow room for future improvements.
There are a lot of not-so-little ideas that have been postponed because they were dependent on the server being able to handle them. With new equipment, this should not be a problem.

PS – Lilo, our cat, is just as excited as we are :)

We know many Postcrossers take their yearly break in the upcoming weeks to relax and visit new places. If you are one of those and you’ll be away from your home address for a while, we recommend you to switch your account to the Inactive state – you can do that easily just by editing your Postcrossing profile. When you are back, all you need to do is to switch it back to Active and you’ll be back in business again! This will tell Postcrossing to not give your address to any other member while you are away. Rest assured that when you’re back, they will be sent your way.

Oh, and don’t forget to re-stock with postcards from the place where you’ll be spending your days away!

Bon voyage!

Postcrossing is three years old today! Horray! We couldn’t let this day go by without thanking the most important part of the project: you!

Since it’s early days, Postcrossing has always focused on having its’ members as a central part of the project. Without you, Postcrossing would simply not work. And what started as a single person pet project, now reaches 184 countries and 57000 members. Furthermore, we reached our first million of Postcards exchanged and we are now on the fast track to the second million! So, once again, thank you!

It’s been a very busy year in the Postcrossing headquarters – the busiest so far, and also the most productive one! In February, after several months of work, we proudly published a major new design of the site with a fresh new look and several new features. This was a very important step on the Postcrossing life, giving it more room to grow and allowing for easy implementation of new features.

But several other events happened during this last year. We had the 1 million postcards contest – thank you everyone who participated! And we organized a donation collection for the SIchuan earthquake, proving once again that Postcrossers are a certainly very special community of users.

The new postcards limits were very welcomed by everyone, favoring the active users as they send more postcards and at the same time keeping a sensible limit on the newcomers.

More recently, we have created the Postcrossing Supporter and Ambassador virtual badges for those of you who help supporting this project by donating money to it or by helping it through an outstanding contribution. If you didn’t noticed the nice looking badges on the site yet, then head to www.postcrossing.com/support for more information how to get one by helping this project grow even more.

By the way, have you heard the news? A marriage was celebrated between two postcrossers who met on the website, and have since moved to Finland! We are very happy to know that this project provided a way for them to meet. Do you know any other nice facts about Postcrossing? If so, be sure to let us know!

We hope you have enjoyed this last year as much as we have. Here’s to another exciting year, filled with smiles and busy mailboxes!

Thank you!