Do they mean literally putting a sign in someone else's yard, without their permission? Is that a done thing? Wouldn't you just drop a note in their letterbox?
Amazing. I live elsewhere in the world so had never heard of that. You are honestly not allowed to put a letter in a friend/neighbour's letterbox? A letter under the doormat then?
>You are honestly not allowed to put a letter in a friend/neighbour's letterbox?
Yes, that is correct. If you want to hand deliver a note to your nextdoor neighbor, their mailbox is off limits. The federal government views that mailbox as some sort of exclusive domain of the USPS. You can leave the note anywhere, other than their mailbox.
The text of the law is:
>Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter such as statements of accounts, circulars, sale bills, or other like matter, on which no postage has been paid, in any letter box established, approved, or accepted by the Postal Service for the receipt or delivery of mail matter on any mail route with intent to avoid payment of lawful postage thereon, shall for each such offense be fined under this title.[1]
(An interesting possibility would be to affix the correct USPS stamp on the note, void said stamp by crossing it out, then hand delivering the note into someone's mailbox. In that case the correct postage would have been paid, so maybe that might be legal? Not a lawyer, just pondering an interesting possibility out loud.)
Interestingly, the most frequent violators of this statue are commercial in my area. Periodically an Amazon contractor will place my package in the mailbox, very rarely UPS or FedEx but by far the biggest violator is DHL. I must believe that DHL instructs their contractors or employees to place packages in the mailbox since there is a greater than 50% chance when I get a DHL package that it ends up in the mailbox.
