Yes, definitely rare
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Absolutely. After more than 500 cards, I have yet to receive one from Sri Lanka.
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I would define to those which I cannot find a person to swap with and also cannot find a person to buy cards from(like Sudan,Syria)
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I just got one from Trinidad and Tobago - I feel like that one was pretty dang rare
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I have some “levels” of rareness in my mind how I see it. For me rare is a country that is new to me, or a country I’ve received/sent under 3.
For me Germany, Russia and USA are the least rare ones.
Then I would say Netherlands, Japan, China and Taiwan.
Then some other European countries.
I also take into factor when saying what is rare, is that how many people live in the place. Say Åland Islands have very little postcrossers, but it has little people too. When for me Uruguay is probably the rarest country. It also has, obviosly, so much more people than Åland.
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Someone of us have the goal of sending postcards to or receiving postcards from rare countries . . . and that got me thinking about how that would be defined.
Since I’m assuming there’s no official definition (correct me if I’m wrong), how would YOU define a rare country?
Low number of postcards sent from it?
Low number of registered users?
I’ve noticed there’s lots of countries with zero current registered users that have had postcards sent from it (either from past registered users or by people on travel mode, I guess).
I’d love to hear thoughts from the group 
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I would define it as any country beyond about the top 25 countries in terms of cards sent.
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I like this definition as it opens it up a bit. I was looking at the bottom 10 or so in terms of users and sent and I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to any of them!
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Other discussion about it
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Thank you!
Ha, since I do not know every country on this planet I’d say, one I’d never heard of yet. Like for some reason I never heard of Macau. ( which my card to is about to expire)
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Honestly, this is one of the coolest things about participating in Postcrossing for me - learning about geography and cultures! It’s so fun when I come across one I didn’t know about! I was just googling “US Minor Outlying Islands” to see what that entails! 
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This may be a slightly different take on your question. More often than not I see requests from members who’d like to get postcards from uncommon or rare countries (they sometimes list them). I replied to several of these since I had some of the countries on their lists; I no longer reply to these requests, however. Invariably, the replies, always polite, were the same: they wanted the cards sent from origin. Too bad…
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To be fair, it’s not a country, but a special region of China - formerly a Portuguese colony and now home to some of the biggest casinos in the world - five out of ten biggest worldwide are on this tiny island.
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I can kind of understand that. If I wanted a postcard from any country in the world I can pretty much find them online and buy them for myself - the thrill (if you will) is being able to get a card from the country of origin that is addressed specifically to you.
Note - I’m fairly new here but I’ve been collecting postcards all my life and my favourites are the ones that were sent to me, as a postcard, even the ones I send to myself (since virtually no one I know travels as much as I do, and for the ones that do, no one sends postcards anymore).
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I don’t quite agree with your statement “If I wanted a postcard from any country in the world I can pretty much find them online and buy them for myself.” We are talking about rare and uncommon countries here. If you could buy them online, obviously they wouldn’t be rare or hard to locate. But I understand a person wanting a card addressed to them.
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I also send postcards to myself when I travel 
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In Postcrossing every area with an own top level domain is a country. That is why Macau, Ho g Kong, Gibraltar, Årland Islands or Puerto Rico are counted as own countries here.
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May I ask, what do you mean by top level domain? I’m interested in this. Thank you.
I mean the two letter country code at the end of an URL internet address, like de for Germany, mx for Mexico, cn for China or ax for Åland Islands, but not .com or .org.
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