Mail thief caught on mailbox camera

KOLD 13 News in Tucson reports that forty-nine million Americans over the past year have had their mail stolen, according to Security.org, and 19% were from Arizona. This story includes a lot of tips… and a great video clip of the surprised thief when he sees the camera in the mailbox:

    Peoria homeowner captures mail thief on unusual mailbox camera

If you know of such a mailbox camera, please leave a comment below (you can be anonymous) or send me an email with the "Contact Us" form at the right edge of any page on this blog. I'll update this blog post. (By the way, I wonder if a different kind — a zoom camera mounted on your home, with a sign on the mailbox saying “You are on camera!” — would be more effective at preventing theft… but not as fun!)

4412 East 6th Street: This box is for the bird(s)

On September 9, 2022, David Aber took a photo of a mailbox with a bird nest and a bird on top. It was so amazing that I decided to go there myself and take several more photos — including one that showed this entire, uh, contraption. Thanks, Dave!

First a closeup of the nest (and the bird eating a worm!):

It looks as if the owner may have put fresh grass in the nest?! I was there on December 1; I didn't check. I also don't remember how tall it was (this next photo was taken from the ground looking up) but I'm guessing four feet:

Closer and closer views from the same side:

Wow.

Correo en un museo

I've been on the road for most of two months. (Maybe I should visit Tucson! 😁)

In December I visited MUFI (short for Museo De La Filatelia… Latin America loves acronyms) in Oaxaca, Mexico. It's the Philatelic Museum, showing stamps and money. MUFI is one of the top-rated museums in town, which surprised me until I visited. It's full of unusual and unique stamps — most fairly recent. What gave me the idea of writing about it on the blog was this buzón (mailbox):

For instance, these stamps are from Ukraine:

Even their signs are in the shape of stamps:

Oaxaca is a wonderful city to visit — even if you aren't into stamps. I took these photos on December 12, 2022.

826 North Venice Avenue: Wildlife

David Aber took these photos of a mailbox covered with desert scenes on September 9th, 2022:

As usual, I don't know how he finds amazing mailboxes like this one!

702 North Venice Avenue: Rob the Bot

David Aber named this mailbox Rob the Bot (as in RoBot, not the kind of bot you're forced to deal with online):

How can you tell that it's a male robot? He has a beard (and bad hair):

That's a zoomed-in view I made with a photo editor. David took the photo on September 9, 2022. (Thanks Dave!)

4563 East 10th Street: Box guarded by a griffin

As Wikipedia says, "Since classical antiquity, griffins were known for guarding treasures and priceless possessions." Although this box may have a factory-produced design (I couldn't find any in an online search), and we don't usually show mailboxes that aren't handmade, having a griffin watching your mail seems like a good idea to me!

Thanks to David Aber for the photo. He took it September 9, 2022.

Box by the border

On Saturday (January 7) I was on a road at the very southwest corner of the US — south of San Diego, just north of the border wall and a few miles from the Pacific. (Click on the "Location" below for a map.) It's a bizarre place, partly because the US side of the border is rural and the Mexican side has a freeway and Tijuana just behind it. This mailbox stood out:

It's a bit hard to tell, but the black band underneath the mailbox is a tire.

Last call for mail to Santa!

The Russians have been bombarding the North Pole, so Santa's email is down. This is your last chance to send Christmas wishes to Jolly Old Santa: a small plastic mailbox east of Randolph Park along Longfellow Avenue, south of Cooper.

I took the photo December 1st.

Most popular mailboxes in ten years (our 10th anniversary)

This blog started exactly ten years ago on 12/12/12 (December 12, 2012) with our first entry What's a mailbox? explaining what we'd show. (Since then, we've also posted Not these mailboxes — which shows “boring” mailboxes we'd show too many times if we kept showing them.)

So you can help us celebrate, we're showing the most popular boxes during our ten years, from highest number of views down to 10th-most views. The older boxes have accumulated more views over the years, so this skews toward older mailboxes.

You can click on title (shown in orange letters) to see the complete original post. If you do that, click or tap your browser's "back" button to return to this page.

1. Desert “air mail” along CA highway 62

March 8, 2013

2. Saguaro You Today?

December 23, 2012

3. 3322 East 24th Street

December 17, 2012

4. 4260 East Calle De Madrid

June 16, 2013

5. 2850 North Tyndall Avenue

May 31, 2016

6. 2345 East Elm Street

December 25, 2013

7. 119 South Irving Avenue

May 31, 2016

8. A mailbox full of poems

May 31, 2016

9. Marvelous Meyer #2: 551 South Meyer

May 31, 2016

10. Seldon Smith's gifts, part 1 of 4

December 7, 2020 (in the area around 4000 East Montecito Street)

Check back on 12/12/32, ten years from now!

Why this box at 11650 East Speedway Boulevard?

This blog is almost ten years old. (Look for a 10th anniversary post on December 12th.) One of my guidelines has been that I usually don't show mass-produced mailboxes, even if they're made by hand. (You can read more by clicking Not these mailboxes, there or at the top of any blog page.) When David Aber emailed some box photos on March 27, I searched using Google Image Search (go to images.google.com and click the camera icon in the search bar). Turns out that Amish people made it by hand. (Here's a Britannica article with more info: Amish: North American religious group.)

Because the blog has been online for so long, I decided to remind us that boxes (usually!) need to be unique. Next time. 😁

The mailbox is at Pegasus Veterinary.

802 South 8th Avenue: What's this?

From time to time I see a mailbox with parts I can't identify. Here's one:

I also can't figure out why it needs a curved post. (Hmmmm… I guess the post fits with the general weirdness of the box.)

If you have a clue, please leave a comment below. (You can be anonymous.)

I drove by — and scratched my head for a while — on March 16, 2022.

Halloween Mailbooooxes

Although it's too late to decorate your mailbox this year (Halloween is today), there are lots of good ideas online. Here's an image search for halloween mailbox on DuckDuckGo (a private search engine that doesn't track what you search for):

    https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=halloween+mailbox&atb=v296-1&iax=images&ia=images

Have a boootiful day!

Flashback to this garden box: 103 South Calle de Jardin

One of the early posts on this blog, Tuesday, May 14, 2013, showed a mailbox that was part of a beautiful wall covered with a mural of flowers and vines. In June of this year (2022), I went back to take closeups of the mural. You can see them in today's post on The Tucson Murals Project blog, titled In 12 years, this garden mural has grown.

I also took closeups of the mailbox:

Fill up your tank at this mailbox: 4802 North Valley Park Avenue

This blog has been quiet while my life has been really busy. (Except for a simple post in May, the last mailbox was on February 21, 2022.) I've been waiting until I had enough photos to post every week. That hasn't happened yet. But I realized that I could post from time to time. So, back to the boxes — for now, slowly!

On April 27, 2022, as I drove over to photograph Joe Pagac's huge Zion City mural, I saw it was so large that I decided to park on the far side of Wetmore so I could fit all of it in my camera. Where Valley Park Avenue meets Wetmore was Sir Clifford's Kustoms, an auto body shop. And in front of the home business was:

(I didn't check the pump to see if it worked. :)

On top was a mailbox with a Mobil logo, like the one below on the pump:

Both sides had a small “signature” near the bottom of the pump:

So don't say that this blog has run out of gas! 😛