Locating USPS Collection Boxes

Today I wanted to send a physical greeting card to a friend via US mail. Our condominium complex has a dropbox for outgoing US mail, but the 4.5-inch slot was not wide enough for me to insert the greeting card without folding it. Instead of driving to the nearest post office, I decided to find the nearest United States Postal Service (USPS) collection box. The iconic blue collection box in my neighborhood was removed many years ago, and this has been happening across the US in an effort to cut costs, reduce mail theft, and possibly for other reasons.

The first thing I did was launch Apple Maps and search for “USPS Collection Box” which revealed exactly what I was looking for. Here is a representative example of what is displayed on the macOS version of Apple Maps (the iOS version looks similar):

Although Apple Maps met my needs, I wondered what the same kind of search would look like in Google Maps. To my surprise, Google Maps does not appear to include the location of USPS mailboxes, at least based on my queries for “USPS Collection Box”, “Mail Collection Box”, and other variations. My findings were consistent with this Reddit thread.

Another obvious place to look for USPS collection boxes is the USPS website, https://www.usps.com/. From the main page, simply click on Locations to invoke the search function. From there, click the “Location Type(s)” dropdown menu and select Collection Boxes as pictured here:

After entering your parameters and clicking the “Search” button, you should see a map like this:

Although the USPS collection boxes are pinned on the map, I prefer the Apple Maps version because I think it looks better and you can also navigate to the nearest collection box using the GPS function.

In summary, if you need to locate a USPS collection box and are using an Apple device, go to Apple Maps and search for “USPS Collection Box”. For all other scenarios, search for USPS collection boxes on the USPS website.