Postcrossing Blog

February is a busy month in the mail calendar, and so it’s time for your yearly heads-up to make sure you have time to prepare!

We love a good mail challenge around here, and since February is the Month of Letters, it is time to dust off all that special stationery and put pen to paper! It’s the perfect opportunity for reconnecting with family and friends, sending a Valentine card to your special someone, saying thank you to the helpful people in your life… or simply surprising strangers across the world with postcards! 😉

The rules of the Month of Letters challenge are simple:

• Mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture or a cutting from a newspaper… anything goes!
• Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

That’s it! The challenge started back in 2012, after American writer Mary Robinette Kowal decided it was time for a break from the internet. She spent a month offline, and asked her friends to communicate with her through letters. The results were relaxing and intimate, so she decided to invite others to join, sparking a yearly flurry of correspondence.
If you’re planning to join this year, you’re welcome to share your progress with other participants on this forum topic.

Another happy mail-related event coming up is Mail Carrier Appreciation Day, which happens every year on February 4th. This is the day to celebrate our trusty mail carriers, who make it possible for this hobby to exist by delivering all our postcards!

The date falls on a Wednesday this year, so be sure to prepare something nice for your mail carrier the day before — for instance, pour your gratitude into a thank you note that you’ll deliver (or affix to your mailbox) for them to discover on their rounds. I’m sure it’ll be the highlight of their day week!

If you can, take a photo of what you did to celebrate this special day, and share a link to it in the comments! 😊

In 2026, the port city of Keelung in northern Taiwan celebrates an incredible milestone: 400 years of history shaped by the sea and by connections with the world. This milestone highlights Keelung’s long-standing role as a port city with deep historical and global ties. To mark the anniversary, the YM Oceanic Culture & Art Museum (in Keelung), together with the Egret Cultural & Educational Foundation, is organizing a special mail art exhibition — and they’re inviting postcrossers everywhere to be part of it! 💙

So here’s the invitation: send a postcard to Keelung with your blessings for its 400th anniversary! Your message (and your creativity) will join hundreds of others, bringing voices from around the world together in one place.

The project is called “Keelung Trade Wind—KEELUNG 400 Mail Art”. The main exhibition about this special anniversary runs from February 3 to May 3, 2026, and postcards sent by Postcrossing members between January and April 30 will later be displayed at the museum from July to December 31, 2026 (after approval by the museum).

What should you send? Anything that feels meaningful and celebratory: a handwritten message, a postcard photo from your hometown, a small illustration, a bit of creative mail art… it’s all welcome.

The museum kindly asks that you begin your postcard like a little letter addressed to them. For example:

Dear YM Oceanic Culture & Art Museum,
Congratulations on Keelung’s 400th anniversary…

After that, it’s up to you. You can send a wish for Keelung, share a greeting from your corner of the world, or write a message about what postcards (and connections!) mean to you. And since this celebration is so closely tied to the sea and to Keelung’s history as a port city, you can also take inspiration from that: write about the ocean, ships, coastlines, lighthouses, sea winds, or the idea of trade routes and journeys. If your own town has a connection to the sea — a harbor, a river, fishing traditions, maritime industries, or stories of people coming and going — feel free to mention it too. It’s a lovely way to connect Keelung’s story with your own.

To help the museum identify your card as part of this collaboration, please add “Postcrossing”, your Postcrossing username, and your country somewhere on the card. And because these postcards will be publicly displayed (and later digitized so we can share the outcome of the project with the community), we recommend keeping your message postcard-style and avoiding personal contact details like email, phone number, address, etc.

Ready to join in? Here is the mailing address:

YM Oceanic Culture & Art Museum
(KEELUNG 400 Mail Art Exhibition)
No. 4, Gangxi St.,
Ren’ai Dist., Keelung City 200002
Taiwan (R.O.C.)

And if you happen to be in Taiwan (or planning a trip there!), you can also visit the museum throughout 2026 and see this celebration in person. From February 3 to December 31, 2026, Postcrossers can enjoy a special ticket price of NT$100 by showing either your Postcrossing profile page on your phone (logged in, with your username visible), or a postcard with a Postcrossing ID written on it at the 1F service counter. Keelung residents (with valid ID) receive free admission.

A small note for planning: the museum is scheduled to close temporarily for exhibition changeover during May–June 2026 (exact dates will be announced by the museum).

We love this kind of collaboration — postcards as tiny ambassadors, travelling across borders to become part of a shared celebration. If you decide to send one, we hope you’ll have fun with it… and we’d love to hear about it too. Happy 400th anniversary, Keelung! 🌊

PS: More information about the museum (including opening times and transportation options) can be checked here or on the Museum’s Facebook page.

Another year has flown by in a blur of stamps, mailbox walks, and little moments of connection… and that means it’s time for one of our favorite traditions: looking back at the year through the numbers. So, without further ado… here’s Postcrossing in numbers for 2025!

4,846,355 postcards received

That’s almost 4.9 million little pieces of paper that made someone smile, taught them a fun fact, or simply arrived at just the right moment. 🥰

30.2 average travel days and 20.2 median travel days

As always, postcards traveled at wildly different speeds — some arrived in just a few days, while others took the scenic route (and occasionally a long nap in a sorting center). The median travel time gives a nice “typical postcard” picture: about three weeks from one mailbox to another. It’s a bit sad to slowly see these numbers go up over the years… but not much we can do about that.

26,797,284,438 kms (16,651,060,580 miles) traveled

It’s always hard to wrap your head around this one… but it’s a lot of distance powered by handwritten messages and tiny stamps — farther than the most distant human-made object in space (currently at about 169 AU, or ~25.3 billion km away). 🤯

19,982 kms (12,416 miles) was the longest distance traveled

This time, instead of a postcard from Spain to New Zealand, it was a postcard from New Zealand to Spain (NZ-266139) that took the longest route, almost 20,000 km! We hope it enjoyed the ride from Feilding to Barraco! These two countries are antipodes and both have a fair number of postcrossers, which is why they’re so often featured in this particular statistic.

The average distance a postcard traveled in Postcrossing in 2025 was around 5,529 kms (or 3,436 miles) — more or less the distance between London and New York, or from Tokyo to Singapore!

1,092,822 postcards were sent from Germany

As they have done for a long time, Germany takes the top spot again this year — and as always, we’re a little in awe of the dedication of German Postcrossers. 👏 There are fewer postcards being sent from there than in previous years, but this is understandable, given last year’s increase in postage.

Here’s a snapshot of other countries in the top 20:

As expected, Europe, North America, and Asia continue to be the strongest continents in Postcrossing!

Shelleh sent the most postcards

A big round of applause to Shelleh, who sent the most postcards in 2025 (2475) and recovered her crown from 2023! 🎉 Amazing!

Åland Islands sent the most postcards per capita

And for the “postcards per capita” crown… Åland Islands! This ranking always makes us smile, because it highlights places where Postcrossing has become a real community habit.

(*) This ranking is calculated per 1,000 inhabitants, for countries with at least 10 members.

October 1 was the day in which the most postcards were sent in 2025 (83,069)

Naturally, October 1 (World Postcard Day) stands out as the busiest sending day of the year — a truly impressive spike of postcards heading out into the world. If you were part of that wave, thank you!

October 1 was the day in which the most postcards were received in 2025 (19,576)

And on the receiving side, unexpectedly, October 1 also takes the top spot! Clearly, it was a very postcardy day! 😊

Postcards were sent from 226 countries and received in 163 countries

This is one of those numbers that always makes us pause. Postcrossing is, at its heart, a global project — and seeing postcards being sent from 226 different countries and territories is a reminder of how far this community reaches… and also, how popular the Travel Mode has become over the years!

13,049 new forum topics and 912,468 forum posts in 2025

The forum continued to be a very lively place in 2025 — for sharing postcard joy, asking questions, organizing swaps and meetups, celebrating milestones, and (of course) showing off beautiful postcards and stamps. If you’ve ever thought “I should check out this forum thing”… this is your sign!

2,329 meetups in 66 countries

And speaking of community: meetups! From big gatherings to tiny café meetups, it’s always wonderful to see Postcrossers turning postcards into real-life friendships. 2025 was an anniversary year and thus saw a big spike in the number of meetups taking place around the world — about 27% more than tje previous year. If you’ve never been to one, what are you waiting for?

12,597 email replies

Behind the scenes, the team kept busy too — replying to emails, helping with accounts, and untangling the occasional postcard mystery. Thank you for your patience and kindness whenever you write to us.

And that’s 2025 in numbers! We hope these little stats snapshots can help give you a big picture of what Postcrossing is like. Whether you sent 5 postcards or 500, thank you for being part of this project and for keeping our analog corner of the internet alive.

Here’s to another year of happy mail, pretty stamps, and postcard-sized surprises in 2026! 💙

PS: For those of you who would like to see longer rankings that don’t fit on a blog post, here they are.

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to visit another planet? Aficionados of sci-fi and fantasy have probably thought about this already, and probably everyone who ever dreamed of being an astronaut… so we thought it’d be interesting to ask about the planets that everyone would love to visit!

Those who’ve been reading my writing prompt posts for a while probably already know that I’m a huge fan of the massive multiplayer online roleplaying game Final Fantasy XIV (don’t worry, I won’t launch into the full joke/meme about the extended free trial, etc). It’s a world “I” spend a fair amount of time in as my avatar, the Warrior of Light, getting up to all kinds of adventures—learning a dozen different fighting styles from mage to monk, becoming a master crafter, catching all the “Big Fish” the game has to offer, etc, etc. (I’m a terrible monk, though.) So I think it’ll have to be my choice now!

There’s so much variety in the world of Final Fantasy XIV, after all, starting with Eorzea (where the story begins) and spreading across the world to Tural, the home of the most recent expansion. There’s something for everyone, and while I don’t possess the skills of a Warrior of Light, I’m pretty sure no one could object to me slipping into the huge library in Old Sharlayan and finding myself a book (or two, or three). And surely I couldn’t get into too much trouble if I took ship for Tuliyollal, to indulge in what look from the cutscenes like truly awesome tacos.

Of course, there are so many other worlds I’m a fan of from fiction, from various fairylands to utopian societies on planets orbiting stars we can see in our night sky. But I’m a humble and unadventurous soul, really, so curious as I am, I’d have to leave the heroics to someone else… but what about you? Is there a planet you’d love to see, and would it be full of adventures?

You can share in the comments here, if you like, and use this as a prompt when you’re not sure what to write on your postcards this month!

When I recently posted some mini-reviews, I talked about being blown away by Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, so here is the promised post about that book! It’s an epistolary novel told entirely through letters from and to the protagonist, Sybil van Antwerp. She’s a retired woman who worked in law and now strictly structures her life around reading and her correspondence, and I really wasn’t sure in reading the blurb whether it’d actually be interesting for me: I thought it might be a bit too literary, or lacking in plot. Honestly, I picked it up mostly because I thought it’d be interesting for a review for Postcrossing! I wasn’t wrong about that, at least…

I’d also wondered how successful the epistolary format would be: apart from the preface and maybe one or two other sections, it’s entirely made up of letters (though some of them aren’t sent), which is also quite the feat. It can be hard to make a story run well through multiple different letters in a way that feels fairly natural but which the reader can follow, but Evans definitely nailed it.

The story doesn’t really have a plot as such, so I was right on that score, though there are a few themes and events that run through the letters. It’s definitely more of a character study, and the letters were the perfect way to show us Sybil’s character (and those of her family and friends)—flaws and all, because Sybil’s absolutely no saint, though she’s no devil either.

There were a couple of things I didn’t love, but they didn’t mar my enjoyment of the book: the main one was that it could be hard to tell whether the letters were directly responding to one another or whether there were gaps in between. They’re dated, and in the right sequence, but I realised after a bit that some of them were responding to letters that aren’t “included”. It makes sense as a decision to keep things a bit tighter and avoid padding it out, but it did feel like a bit of a leap between letters in terms of events or changing attitudes. It’s worth knowing going in that there are letters “missing” (so to speak, since of course, they aren’t real letters and the “missing” letters don’t actually exist), so you don’t always get the full story.

In the end, I absolutely tore through the book, and really enjoyed my time getting to understand Sybil and her circle through the letters. There are some hard-hitting themes (coming to terms with disability, family rifts, and the loss of a child) which it unfurls carefully, giving you a piece at a time and making sure it’ll land before you learn the truth about each bit of the story. Highly recommended!