23 Surprising Facts About Postal Services Around the World

Junk mail destroys 100 million trees a year. This is the equivalent of deforesting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every four months.

Canada Post receives millions of letters addressed to Santa Claus each year, with a special dedicated postal code, H0H 0H0. About 15,000 current and retired Canada Post employees respond to each letter received pretending to be Santa.

After the USPS began offering parcel post, numerous poor families used the service to mail their children to relatives. One girl was mailed to her grandmother 73 miles away for just 53 cents.

The United Parcel Service (UPS) considers bull semen a "common item that may be hazardous."

In 1971, FedEx got down to the last $5,000, which wasn't enough to refuel the planes to make that weekend’s deliveries. With impending bankruptcy and no other options, CEO Fred Smith literally took all of it to Vegas, got lucky, and turned it into enough money to refuel, finish the shipments, and save the company.

FedEx planes have anti-missile countermeasures and are the only commercial planes to currently carry them.

In 1959, the USPS attempted to deliver mail via cruise missile and successfully shipped 3,000 pieces of mail from Virginia to Florida in 22 minutes.

The longest mail route in the United States is 187.6 miles (300km). Jim Ed Bull, the 72-year-old letter carrier, drives the route 5 days a week through rural Oklahoma. He only makes about 200 deliveries throughout the whole trip.

The Israeli postal service receives more than 1,000 letters addressed to "God" every year. Instead of disposing or archiving them, the undeliverable mail department opens them and puts them between the cracks of the Western Wall.

USPS has a post office at the South Pole with the postal code 96598.