Okay, so I was too lazy but I convinced my husband to go outside and take a picture of our mailbox— where our mail is delivered— at the end of our driveway. Pretty boring.
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It might be boring for you, but it’s really amuzing for people from other countries! Thanks for sharing 
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Not at all. I have never seen that kind of Mailbox.
How about the letter box where your mail is collected from? What does that look like?
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I can’t speak for how @jschentur chooses to mail her cards, but in most cases in the US, you just put your outgoing mail in your mailbox and the mail carrier picks it up when they deliver.
This was mine on the outside of my house in Michigan. Incoming and outgoing all in the same place.
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It’s beautiful!
But what are the hooks for? (Looks to me like hanging a bike, if you get one in the mail 
, but maybe not.)
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The hooks seem to be for a flower box.
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oh i love this topic, very interesting.
that sounds quite perfect. if you’re home bound for some reason or just lazy you can always mail out your cards. does that happen in other parts of the world too? in the netherlands most houses have like holes in the door for the mail so that is not a thing here.
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For me the hooks look like they are for (rolled or folded?) newspaper
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Newspaper
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This one was in a wall in Scotland, but I can’t remember where exactly…
Here it is - wider shot
I have a few more coming, but have to find them first.
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I read the thread before going out to post some mail, so I took a pic! Here’s how my usual letterbox looks like
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Okay. Here’s a really cool old vintage postbox still in use inside the Strater Hotel in Durango, Colorado:
https://www.instagram.com/p/_FYmd3Gvqz/?igshid=88iiyozqmnkl
And my mailbox in front of my house:
It is a locking mailbox which is also bolted into the ground. We have a lot of mail theft in our city, so we need to have this to safeguard our mail.
First I grab the key (it’s the little one next to the shark)
And I go to unlock it
Here’s the inside. The rag is for when it rains (which is not often). If I don’t have the rag in there, water will pool and damage the cards.
When I have something to mail, I put it into a clip on the box door that the postman opens:
Then I put the flag out to let the postman know that I have outgoing mail. 
Here is the slot the postman puts our mail into.
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When I spent some holidays in Italy back in the 1990s, there were those boxes also in blue. Do the blue ones still exist? And what are/were they good for?
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I’ve never seen postboxes that are not locked here in Germany… How come that mail is not stolen everywhere people use unlocked boxes to send out their mail. o.o
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As far as I can remember, I only saw a blue letter box once in my life!
I quickly searched for some info about them, but I couldn’t find any - btw I was born in the early 90’s, so I would say they were dismissed right after/early 2000? But I may be wrong (Italian postcrossers, if anyone is reading maybe you know better!)
Instead I found some pics: blue boxes were for international mail, red ones for domestic mail (they also may be divided in two halves: one for the correspondence inside the same city, the second one for other destinations)
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Thanks for your reply. Well I used the red ones and the blue ones as well, and in both cases the cards arrived weeks after my holidays.
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Is it correct to say that this is the postal system for most residences in the US? Where you collect/post your mail via your letterbox? Or is there a different system in different parts of the US?
@Axolotl_ Frequently mailboxes are attached to your house at your front door, or at the end of your (short) driveway in sight of the main windows. Mail does get stolen very occasionally, but in most places any theft is likely to be extremely targeted - houses where everyone knows a retiree lives who gets a check at the beginning of the month are really the main targets, sadly. I lived in a city in California notorious for crime but only had one thing stolen from my mailbox in 3 years.
@shermint Other situations exist, one I can think of is where a group of houses have a single large structure for all the mailboxes (those look like this below).
I don’t believe you can send outgoing mail from there, but I’m not sure, I’ve never had one. I’ve also never had one of the cool standalone mailboxes where you put the flag up to say you have outgoing mail, I’ve always had flat mailboxes against the house where you just clip the mail to the outside of it.
And here is a photo of a mailbox in Canada:
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