Postcrossing Blog

It’s our birthday today! Hurraaaaaaaay!! 🎉🥳🎉

Postcrossing turns 21 today, and it feels both completely impossible and somehow true. Twenty-one years of postcards crossing oceans, borders, mountains, deserts and kitchen tables… one small handwritten message at a time.

Postcrossing started back in 2005 with what was just a little experiment: what if strangers around the world could send each other real postcards, and the internet could help make that happen? All these years later, that idea is still going, carried by all of you: the people choosing postcards, writing messages, licking stamps, walking to postboxes, and making someone’s mailbox a little happier. Multiply that by 87 million postcards, and suddenly this little experiment becomes something much bigger: a worldwide web of connections made out of paper, handwriting, stamps, and friendly surprises.

Thank you for being part of Postcrossing, whether you joined yesterday or have been here since 2005. Thank you for every postcard sent, every kind message written, every meetup organized, every mailbox checked with hope… and every bit of patience when the mail takes the scenic route. A special thank you as well to everyone who spread the word, hosted a meetup, helped out on the forum or helped us keep the lights on!

To celebrate today, we’re also bringing back the Postcard Lounge! If you’d like to write some postcards in the quiet company of other postcrossers head over to the Postcard Lounge page. Bring some postcards, your favorite pen, maybe a cup of tea or coffee, and come write with us for a little while!

Here’s to 21 years of postcard magic, and to all the postcards still waiting to be written, sent, traveled, received and smiled over. Thank you for making this community what it is! 💙

Postcrossing’s 21st anniversary is almost here (hurray!), and we’re bringing back something we tried last year and ended up loving: the Postcard Lounge!

For those of you who have not joined the last time, the idea is simple: an online space where the community can quietly write postcards together. Everyone joins on video but stays muted — just a shared little window into desks, postcards, pens, stamps, and people writing mail in different corners of the planet.

We first tried this during Postcrossing’s 20th anniversary and then again for World Postcard Day, and both times were really cozy experiences. There’s something comforting about sitting down to write a few cards and knowing that, at that exact moment, other postcrossers are doing the same thing somewhere else in the world.

So we’re doing it again for the 21st anniversary! On July 14th, the Postcard Lounge will be open for a few hours (in UTC), and you’ll be able to join through this page:

Postcard Lounge 📮

That page shows the opening hours in your own time zone, so you don’t need to do any time zone math. On the day itself, it’s also where you’ll find the button to join the call. If you can’t join the video call directly, you’ll still be able to watch the livestreamed grid of participants on the same page.

As before, this is meant to be a calm, friendly space to write postcards in good company. Bring a few cards, your favorite pen, maybe a cup of tea or coffee, and come hang out quietly with postcrossers around the world for a little while.

We hope to see you there on July 14th — and we hope many postcards will start their journeys from this tiny online lounge!

Has it really been 20 years? The mind boggles at the number… that’s two whole decades spent thinking about this wild idea of connecting the world through postcards. 7,671 days of postcards, stamps, addresses, smiles, and stories. No one could have predicted this adventure would last this long… and yet, here we are. We’re so grateful for all these years, and especially grateful to the over 800,000 of you who joined us for the ride! THANK YOU! 💙

When I reflect on this milestone, I think a lot about creation versus maintenance. Putting something new in the world — whether it’s a project, a community, or even a child — is one thing. But caring for it and keeping it going year after year takes a very different kind of energy. There are countless hours behind the scenes (and the screens) filled with routine, repetition, and sometimes quite a bit of drudgery, just to keep things running smoothly.

But then, there are the stories. The unexpected postcards that bring someone to tears. The joy of discovering a new place or culture. The child learning geography from a map full of colorful cards. The grandma feeling less alone because someone, somewhere, thought of them. All these small and simple connections often make a very big difference in someone’s day, in their understanding of the world, or sometimes even in their sense of belonging. They’re the quiet proof that connection, even through something as analog as a postcard, still matters very much today — perhaps even more.

To everyone who has helped Postcrossing thrive, a very special thank you. Whether you’ve spread the word, hosted a meetup, helped out on the forum, sent feedback or helped support the project financially: you’ve helped keep this idea alive. ❤️ Your enthusiasm and generosity make all the difference.

Now it’s time for celebrations, and you guys have really come through! Our anniversary gallery is also brimming with nice photos of postcrossers and their 20 postcards, which is just a delight to see! If you haven’t posted your photo yet, we invite you to do so today. We’re all a community here, and seeing other people from all over the world who have this one thing in common with us feels really special.

There are an astonishing 179 meetups happening around the world marking the occasion, and so we hope many of you will have (or had) the chance to join to meet old friends or make new ones. 😍 In Germany, in the USA and in Poland (at the Warsaw Post Office 1's Philatelic Shop), special cancellation postmarks have been made for the occasion, so look out for those!

And if you didn’t get the chance to join a meetup, we invite you to join us in the Postcard Lounge today, for a relaxing moment of postcard writing! It’s a silent streaming room and an experiment in connection — a place where we sit down to write postcards together (but apart). Put some music on, grab your favorite drink and some postcards, and take a seat at our virtual table! ☺️

And last but not least, we also have exciting news for postcrossers in the Netherlands: PostNL is launching a celebratory stamp for this very special occasion! Hoera! 🎉

They should be available on PostNL’s shop from today, and we’re going to tell you more about this stamp in an upcoming interview with its designer… but for now, we leave you with a small introduction to the stamp:

"The Postcrossing stamp sheet, designed by Sandra Smulders, visualises the global exchange of postcards through bold geometric shapes and zigzagging lines. Inspired by the idea of connection and reciprocity, the design features triangles and rectangles symbolising people, postcards, and the world.

A red-white-blue colour scheme subtly forms the Dutch flag, while dynamic lines represent the movement of mail across borders. The central layout and repeating elements create balance and unity, capturing the spirit of Postcrossing—sharing, receiving, and connecting through mail."

So that’s it! Whether you’re joining a meetup, writing a card, or just quietly smiling at your mailbox, we hope you’ll find a little moment to celebrate this milestone in your own way. Eat some cake, raise a glass, dig into your postcard stash, or do a little happy dance — whatever feels most festive to you! And if you do something special to mark the occasion, we’d love to see it: feel free to share your celebration with us and the community on the forum or on social media, using the hashtag #postcrossing20.

Thanks for being part of this journey. Here’s to postcards, to people, and to the power of small things. And here’s to the next 20 years, come what may! 🎉

Some of you might have seen a picture of PT-1, the very first postcard ever sent through Postcrossing — the one that started it all! It’s a blue-skied postcard featuring three majestic lighthouses, sent by Paulo to Ana (that’s me!). As you can imagine, it’s always been a special postcard for us, but the publisher that made them has long closed and so they haven’t been available for many years. We always wished they would come back though…

So, especially for Postcrossing’s 20th anniversary, we took matters into our own hands: we worked out the legal bits, tracked down the original photographer, licensed the photos, and made it happen! 💪

The front of the card is true to the original one, and the back is designed to celebrate this milestone. And to make it even more special, we added something new too: a sheet of fun cinderella stamps! These aren’t real postage stamps, but they’re great for decorating your postcards on this special year. They feature Postcrossing’s iconic red “P” and a yellow “20”, the anniversary we’re celebrating.

Since it’s the 20th anniversary, each bundle has 20 postcards and a stampsheet with 20 decorative cinderella stamps, all wrapped up with a paper band.

We did a small batch of these, and they have just been added to the Postcrossing shop — so if you’d like to grab one, now’s your chance! Purchases will be limited to one pack per person, and we might print a few more if there’s enough interest. These will all be shipped from Europe.

This is our first time making a physical product from beginning to end (working with printers and suppliers, looking at different papers, thinking about packaging, etc.), and we’re eager to put all this knowledge into new fun things in the future. We hope you like the special anniversary bundle, and that we’ll see a few of these postcards pop up on the postcard walls over the coming months!

Last month, we invited everyone to join or organize a meetup in celebration of the website’s upcoming 20th anniversary, and since then, dozens of them have popped up all around the world! 😍 It’s been a joy to see all of these meetings being organized, and that so many of you are planning to attend. The celebrations don’t stop there though!

To mark this special milestone, we want YOU to be part of the celebration — with a photo challenge!

Your mission: grab 20 postcards and take a photo with them! You can hold them up, fan them out like a giant deck of cards, arrange them into a big “20”, or take them to your favorite spot in town, a sunny postbox, your local post office, or anywhere that brings a smile to your face. Be creative, be playful, and above all, be part of the party!

We’ve set up a special gallery to collect all your happy pictures from around the world. Just like in past years, it’s a way to celebrate together, even if we’re all in different places.

📮 Upload your photo and join the celebration! ✨

We can’t wait to see your smiling faces, your postcards, and the beautiful ways you choose to celebrate this special milestone with us. 📮 Let’s make this a birthday to remember — go go go!