Wednesday 20 September 2017

Questions on Snail Mail? What are they?

What are the questions and issues on Snail Mail people have? I can think of a few which I'll list below, but what other questions arise for this hobby?

  • How do you keep track of correspondence?
  • How do you store your letters?
  • What do you write in letters?
  • Why do you write letters in a digital age?
  • What are some of the things I can enclose with the letter?
  • Does age and gender matter when seeking out new penpals?
  • What do I do with the used stamps if I am not keeping the envelopes?
  • Do people still write with fountain pens?

Feel free to comment and answer any of these questions. 

Friday 1 September 2017

Royal Mail drops out of the FTSE100

With Royal Mail falling out of the FTSE100 index, I was reading an opinion on a stamp discussion board suggesting that if Royal Mail cancelled (postmarked) stamps used for postage properly, there would not be a trade in used but unmarked no gum/self-adhesive postage stamps. Perhaps eBay sells at least 10 million of these no gummed used but unmarked stamps in a year. First class is 65p. 10 million first class = £6,500,000.  

I had posted before about people reusing as postage used stamps but still see from public posts on Facebook that some people still do this illegal practice. It is fraud and these people who do it are con artists, in my book.  

Came across a news page on a stamp dealer's site :
Operation Gum-Gum. A new generation of people are now unaware of the seriousness of such fraud. In 1989 the police, in association with Royal Mail, started an investigation under the name of "Operation Gum Gum". They built up evidence against a number of people who were buying kiloware, extracting unfranked stamps (and in some cases even cleaning off light postmarks), and selling them on to others. Those who were targeted found it a surprising and scary ordeal. Some individuals were arrested, some of these tried and convicted, and some ended up with prison sentences. For a while this had the predictable effect of stopping commercial activity in stamps without postmarks.