Stolen from the mail

A couple of years ago, Brown Bag Lit, a writing community I participate in, hosted a talk by Joshunda Sanders, author of Women of the Post, a terrific historical novel about the “Six-Triple Eight,” a predominantly black, all-female battalion of the Women’s Army Corps that served in Europe during World War II. Their task? To sort through a backlog of over one million pieces of mail in England and France. Mail from home was considered so important to keeping up soldiers’ spirits, the group’s motto was “No Mail, Low Morale.”

In the odd way your mind can sometimes make strange connections, I’ve been thinking about that book and the story of the Six-Triple Eight quite a bit the past couple of weeks as I’ve been dealing with the fallout from fraud related to a check stolen from the mail in Brooklyn. Because everyone I’ve described the story to has had a similar initial reaction:

“You mailed a check?”

As if I should have known better.

The decline of the U.S. Postal Service has a long, complex history well beyond the scope of this piece. The bottom line is we don’t want or need to use regular mail nearly as much as in the past. According to one report, the volume of first-class mail began to drop in the late 1990s and fell 50% from 2008 to 2023, largely as a result of email and other forms of digital communication. But even with that reduced volume, in the last five or six years, the Postal Service has gotten a lot less timely and reliable, arguably as a result of poor management by Louis DeJoy, Postmaster General from 2020 until his resignation this past spring. Making people even less inclined to want to use the mail.

Still, even in 2025 you can’t always do everything online. As shocking as my Gen Z kids find it, sometimes you have to send a letter or pay a bill the old-fashioned way.

But only if you dare.

Theft of mail has grown astronomically—a reported 87% from 2019-2022—and authorities seem unable or unwilling to stop it. This isn’t just a New York City problem. The Postal Service may have already swapped your local mailbox for a new, tamper-resistant version with a narrower mail slot and a mechanism that will rip an envelope if you try to retract it, much like the “tiger teeth” car rental agencies use to prevent car theft. But not surprisingly, determined criminals have already found a way around those protections with a new method of “mail fishing” to catch envelopes before they fall completely into the box (the flat glue traps typically used for mice). In fact, the technique has become so common in my neighborhood, I automatically feel inside any mailbox for adhesive before taking a chance on using it.

Given that awareness, I felt particularly stupid for having a check stolen because I was in too big a rush one day to bring the mail to our shipping store like I normally do and instead took a chance on dropping several letters into what seemed like a “clean” mailbox. Then again, the check might not have been stolen from the mailbox at all. Internal theft by postal workers is a significant issue too, so it’s impossible to know exactly where or how my mail was stolen.

Which goes back to the question I got from friends: “You mailed a check?”

I find it hard to believe we’re all going to meekly accept that the U.S. mail is no longer secure enough to use at all. The drafters of the Constitution considered an independent, functioning mail service important enough to our new country that in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7, they specifically assigned to Congress the power to “establish Post Offices.” Maybe someday what we think of as mail will be entirely superseded by digital communications, but for now, reliable mail service remains an important aspect of our business and personal lives. The women of the Six-Triple Eight needed a tremendous strength of will and determination to get the mail moving again. If only we could muster that same level of commitment and find some way to make the Postal Service trustworthy again.