Postcrossing Blog

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!

Can you believe it? Postcrossing is turning 20 years old in just under two months, on July 14! We’re not quite sure how that happened either… Time flies when you’re sending postcards! Over the years, we’ve heard from postcrossers who joined back in high school, took a break during university and early adulthood, and then found their way back to the project years later to introduce it to their own children. It’s been quite the journey, and we’re happy every single one of you is here to share it with us.

But we’ll save the emotional stuff for later — right now, it’s time to get ready to celebrate! 🎉 And what’s a celebration without friends? So your first mission is to join or organize a Postcrossing meetup around July 14 to mark this big milestone. Whether you’ve been around since the early days or just joined recently, this is a good opportunity to meet fellow postcrossers, share stories, and enjoy some quality postcard-writing time together.

Since the anniversary falls on a Monday, we know it might not be the easiest day for everyone to meet. So feel free to plan your meetup for the weekend before or after! A casual get-together at a coffee shop, a sunny picnic in the park, or even a group trip to a local museum — anything goes, as long as it brings people together in the spirit of Postcrossing. There are a few planned already, but we hope to see lots more pop up in the coming weeks!

To help make these meetups feel extra special (and a bit more connected), we’ve created a special postcard template just for the occasion. You can download it from the 20 Years page and customize it with a photo — for bonus points, we suggest using a picture of a local postbox, if possible! Then just update the details with your meetup location, date, and image credit information, and you’re ready to go. With many meetups around the world using the same design template, we’ll have a shared visual celebration: one postcard, many places!

We hope you’ll join in the fun, wherever you are. Let’s make this a anniversary to remember, filled with laughter, postcards, and lots of new connections! And stay tuned for more anniversary activities coming soon… 😊

Now that the rush of the 80 million milestone is behind us, it’s time to sit down and sift through the data to see how Postcrossing is doing, stats-wise. We know many of you like to check out these posts with numbers and statistics, so let’s get to it!

5,014,287 postcards received

That’s a good 58,827 postcards more than last year, which is great to see! A steady average of 5 million postcards a year is quite impressive and puts us on track to celebrate 100 million postcards sometime in 2029!

29.1 average travel days and 19.2 median travel days

Average travel times keep increasing slightly, year after year, reflecting postal delays, global logistical challenges or just a higher number of postcards traveling over slower routes. However, the median travel days have only slightly increased, indicating that most postcards still arrive in a reasonable timeframe.

27,256,320,327 kms (16,936,292,258 miles) traveled

That’s a little bit more than Voyager 1’s current distance from Earth! 🛰️

19,941 kms (12,391 miles) was the longest distance traveled

Postcard ES-784984 was our long distance winner of 2024, again with the classic combo from Spain to New Zealand! Sabine (aka sabine223) from Germany used the Travel Mode in Spain last February and unknowingly sent the postcard that traveled the longest distance last year, aaaaaaaaaall the way to Neil (aka durbanshark) in Auckland.

The average distance a postcard traveled in Postcrossing in 2024 was around 5,436 kms (or 3,377 miles). It looks like our average postcard easily travels the length of a continent, which is impressive!

1,194,298 postcards were sent from Germany

Germany is once again the country with the most postcards sent in Postcrossing, at just over 1 million postcards per year! 💪 The USA came very close to that magical number, but is not yet over the threshold. Surprisingly, China had a big jump up the charts this year, surpassing Finland and Japan to reach the fifth place in the rankings. Well done! Here’s how the rest of the top 20 chart looks like:

For those unfamiliar with this statistic, here’s a quick explanation: it represents the number of postcards sent from these countries and registered in 2024. This includes some postcards that were sent in 2023 but only registered in 2024, while others requested in 2024 are not included because they’re still in transit and will likely be registered in the coming weeks or months. By focusing on postcards registered within a specific timeframe, we can maintain consistency and make comparisons with previous years more straightforward.

BeckyS sent the most postcards

Looks like BeckyS grabbed first place this year, up from second last year! 😊 The top 5 senders in Postcrossing continue to be from the USA: BeckyS (2,297), ennasor (2,280), Shelleh (2,273), Djain (2,237) and RomaandPaul (2,231) took the top spots. All of them have chosen to exchange postcards within the USA, which speeds things up… as does the fact that the USA does not currently send mail to Russia, a country with slower mail delivery.

If we count only international exchanges though, then ned44440 in Ireland 🇮🇪 takes the cake, with 1,871 postcards sent! Other runner-ups are mapcardcollector 🇬🇧 (1,841), tiinama 🇫🇮 (1,833), SMatti 🇫🇮 (1,827) and uconn 🇺🇸 (1,802).

Åland Islands sent the most postcards per capita

Åland Islands, Finland and Liechtenstein continue to be the top contributors per capita, with Belarus rising through the rankings this year to grab fourth place.

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

October 1 was the day in which more postcards were sent in 2024 (81,810)

As expected, and even with some limits in place, World Postcard Day continues to beat all the records, with about five times more postcards being sent on that day than on any other random day. 😅 It’s a lot of pressure on Postcrossing’s servers and database, but each year we introduce tweaks that seem to improve the situation and help things go smoothly.

Other big days this year were December 1st (the start of the Cards for Literacy initiative), the days around October 1st, and other assorted days between January and March.

November 13 was the day in which more postcards were received in 2024

Usually, the day with most postcards received is sometime in January… but not in 2024! November 13 saw the peak of postcards being registered, with 19,866 of them arriving to their destinations on that day alone. Most of the other high volume days happened between October and January.

Postcards were sent from 224 countries and received in 157 countries

Postcards were sent from an additional 3 countries or territories this year! Woohoo! Thanks to the Travel Mode, more and more postcrossers make an effort to locate a local wifi network, postcards and a post office during their trips abroad, so that they can send some postcards. That’s why the difference between the number of countries that sent postcards and those that received them is relatively large. Neat!

11,572 new forum topics and 892,564 forum posts in 2024

Less new forum topics, but more posts in 2024! The forum continues to be a welcoming space to organize events, swap postcards, play games or just a place where people can chat and get to know each other. This is thanks to our team of volunteer moderators, who do an excellent job keeping things tidy and running smoothly.

1,835 meetups in 62 countries

A slightly higher number of meetups, but the same number of countries! A curious mind might ask whether these 62 countries were the exact same ones that had meetups in 2023… they were not! For instance, Gibraltar, Jordan and Denmark all had meetings in 2024 but did not have them the year before. Wouldn’t it be cool if in the future we could have meetings in 100 different countries? It should be possible!

11,987 email replies

This is how many support emails the team has replied to throughout the year — a mind-boggling average of 32 per day. 🤯 That’s… a lot of emails!

And that’s all, folks! 2024 was another good year for Postcrossing, and these numbers offer a fascinating glimpse into it, highlighting the impressive scale and reach of our community. As we get started in 2025, there’s plenty to look forward to — new milestones, evolving trends, and even more postcards connecting people across the world. Here’s to another great year of postcards and connections!

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