I haven't posted books in a while so I am a little fuzzy on a few things. If I have a book being sent media mail that weighs less than a pound & they have postage & DC on them, can they be mailed from a neighborhood mailbox?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Hi Rosanne,

Anything with electronic postage can be dropped off in a mailbox.  If you are using stamps, the package can only be mailed from a mailbox if it is under 13 oz.  Otherwise you have to take it to the PO or hand it personally to your mail carrier. 

Thanks Alisa. I usually go to the PO on Friday but after I got home today , I received another request. I will mail it at the neighborhood box tomorrow.

I do not think that handing a book over 13 oz. to your mail carrier is the same as taking it to the post office and I would not recommend mailing books weighing over 13 oz. and not having either PBS postage or DC on them with your mail carrier. They will be returned to you!

I signed up in December, because I am a fool, and listed hundreds of books right off the bat, because I am a fool. So of course I had about two dozen books I had to mail out the week before Christmas. I printed PBS postage for all of them, and one night I drove around to multiple post offices of the kind that have an all-night lobby with an Automated Postal Center dropbox inside, but the APCs were all full, crammed with people's last-minute gifts! I was pulling out of the last post office's parking lot when I saw that on the street they had like a blue neighborhood-type mailbox, except it was a doublewide (have never noticed one of these before!). I checked it out, didn't seem to be full, so I dumped all twenty-some books in there, and I know some of them were 3-pound-rate multi-book packages. Maybe a little reckless (I was pretty disgruntled at all the pointless driving I had just done) but, you know what? They all made it to where they were going.

You can drop books over 13 oz into any blue box IF it has PBS postage.  Only books with stamps are not allowed. 

The post office rules were written to track mail bombs and terror threats back to the source.  The PO can back track with the PBS postage or Paypal postage.