Unfortunetly We live on a farm outside of town
by
Oldwestman
+3
Our nearest neighbor is 1/2 mile away and the local teenagers like to get in the bed of a pick up with a baseball bat and go mailbox hunting and they like the fancy ones the best. We tried to dress up our mailbox but after the third time of spending 2 hours fixing and patching up our mailbox we opted for a plain jane box and haven't had any problems since. I have a friend that used large steel square tubing welded to a steel post 3 ft in the ground. He cut out the bottom out of a new mailbox and put it over his square tubing and he heard the bong of the baseball bat that night and found pieces of the bat next to the box. He never had the problem again. I really don't want to go that far and I wish there was a simpler solution.
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So sorry to hear about your problems, did you have a question? Obviously, you don't want to make a target of your mailbox but stone, cement and steel seem to be a deterrent.
install a camera and catch the little punks.
You might install cameras and also a note on Facebook or in the local paper.....tearing up mail boxes is a federal offence.....US Postal Service etc. Just saying...
There is no simpler solution. Either make or have a steel mail box made and pretty it up and it will be there for the next generation of kids to do the same thing.
I had the same problem many years back. (Went through 13 mailboxes) But it wasn't just kids with baseball bats..... one of the mailboxes (that was painted pretty) was literally stole and the culprit left the screws that they were held on by. So we got the plain ole' ordinary black mailbox and they quit hitting it, because at night the mailbox wasn't visible. (we also took the reflectors down at the end of our driveway)
Our friend put a steel post in the ground and filled it with cement to deter the culprits. Another built a brick surrounding around their whole post and mailbox.
You could simply put up a sign that says, "Smile, you're on camera!"...... even if you don't have a camera on it..... :)
You could contact your postmaster. I think that is a federal offence.