Why Post & Porch Joined the Locking Mailbox Conversation

There’s something a little strange about a mailbox when you think about it – It sits outside, often near the street; sometimes several yards from the house. And inside it, we routinely leave things we’d never intentionally leave sitting out in public: checks, replacement credit cards, tax documents, medical correspondence, bills, personal letters, and plenty of other mail with our names and information printed all over it.

For a long time, that arrangement didn’t get much thought. You put up a mailbox, the mail arrived, you grabbed it when you got home. But the way people use their mailboxes has changed, and so has the conversation around mail theft. But it’s important to know: Post & Porch didn’t begin as a mailbox security company. 

We started in Utah in 2017 because our founder, Danny Pilkington, couldn’t find modern address numbers he actually wanted to put on a house. Those first magnetic house numbers eventually led us to post-mount mailboxes, including The Malone, after we ran into another category full of flimsy, builder-grade choices that left plenty of room for improvement.

Once we started making mailboxes, though, we had to think about more than how they looked from the road – we had to think about what was sitting inside them.

A locking mailbox can sound like one of those things you buy because you’re worried about a very specific worst-case scenario, but the numbers tell a broader story.

The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General has been tracking mail theft closely enough that it remains a major focus of federal prevention and enforcement efforts. Its 2026 follow-up audit found that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service received more than 800,000 mail theft complaints during fiscal years 2023 through 2025. Complaints declined during 2024 before increasing again in 2025 in nearly every Postal Inspection Service division.

A few numbers put the scale into perspective:

• 800,000+ mail theft complaints were received by the Postal Inspection Service from FY2023 through 2025.
• During that same period, the Postal Inspection Service recorded 6,510 mail theft cases and 1,903 robbery cases.
• Federal mail-theft strategy now specifically includes more secure mail receptacles and better locking mailbox mechanisms among the methods being used to improve delivery security.
• In a separate analysis of mail theft-related check fraud, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reviewed 15,417 reports from 841 financial institutions representing more than $688 million in reported suspicious activity during one six-month period.
• Of the stolen checks examined in that analysis, 44% were altered and deposited, 26% were used to create counterfeit checks, and 20% were fraudulently signed and deposited.

Those figures measure different parts of the problem, so they shouldn’t be treated as a count of individual homeowners who had something taken from their personal mailbox. They do show why mail security has become a serious national conversation rather than a niche concern.

And that matters when your business happens to make the thing people leave their mail in.

The easy solution would have been to make a modern mailbox that looked secure. Heavy. Industrial. Covered in visible hardware. Maybe a little like it belonged behind an office building or outside a government facility, but that wasn’t particularly interesting to us. Post & Porch got into mailboxes because we thought something as ordinary as a mailbox could contribute to the front of a home. The locking mailbox version had to earn its place there, too.

That became part of the thinking behind the Malone Post-Mounted Mailbox with Lock.

The locking mechanism is built into the post-mount mailbox while preserving the same clean shape that made The Malone an important product for us in the first place. It’s constructed from 14-gauge galvanized steel, finished with a durable powder coating, and available in regular and large sizes for different amounts of everyday mail.

The regular Malone post-mount mailbox measures 9.5 inches wide by 9 inches high by 21 inches deep, while the large mailbox measures 12 inches wide by 9 inches high by 21 inches deep. That extra room matters more in a locking mailbox than people sometimes realize.

Security isn’t especially helpful if the mail that needs protecting doesn’t fit.

The purpose of a locking mailbox is pretty simple: once mail has been delivered, the locking mailbox customer-access door helps prevent someone passing by from simply opening the mailbox and removing what’s inside – that distinction is important.

A secure locking mailbox isn’t a vault, and we don’t think homeowners should be told otherwise. No residential mailbox can guarantee that mail will never be stolen, damaged, or tampered with. What a lock does is add another barrier between your delivered mail and someone who shouldn’t have it. For opportunistic theft, that can be meaningful.

Think about the difference between mail sitting behind a standard door that takes a second to open and mail sitting behind a locked access point. One is immediately available, while the other requires considerably more effort, attention, and risk.

Sometimes adding friction is the whole point.

Find out more about locking mailboxes in this FAQ by Post & Porch →

Checks understandably get much of the attention because stolen checks can turn into significant financial fraud. FinCEN’s analysis showed stolen mail being used not only to alter checks, but also to create counterfeit versions using the original information.

But plenty of important mail doesn’t have a dollar amount printed across the front – a replacement bank card matters, and so does a tax document. Even a piece of mail containing personal account information matters. The same goes for legal correspondence, medical statements, insurance information, government documents, birthday cards containing gift cards, and personal letters that were never intended for anyone except the recipient.

For some households, the deciding factor is even simpler: the mailbox sits unattended for a long time. Maybe you leave for work before the carrier arrives and don’t get home until dark. Maybe your post-mount mailbox is close to a sidewalk or busy road. Maybe you travel frequently. Maybe you have a second home. Or maybe you’re simply not very good at checking the mail every afternoon.

We understand that last one.

A mailbox lock gives delivered mail a more protected place to wait for you.

To learn what you can’t get delivered without a locking mailbox, click here →

This is worth saying because security products have a tendency to be marketed as if everybody is one unfortunate afternoon away from disaster – that’s not especially useful.

If your mailbox is in a low-traffic location, you’re usually home when mail arrives, you retrieve it promptly, and you rarely receive sensitive mail, a traditional mailbox may do exactly what you need it to do. A locking mailbox starts making more sense when the way you live creates longer gaps between delivery and retrieval, when your mailbox is particularly exposed, or when you simply place a higher value on keeping incoming mail less accessible.

It’s an option, not a requirement.

That philosophy fits Post & Porch pretty well. We already give homeowners choices around mailbox size, color, posts, house numbers, finishes, and other details because homes and routines aren’t all identical; security can be one more choice.

Mail delivery looks different from one house to another. A post-mounted locking mailbox makes sense for homes where mail is delivered curbside. That’s where The Malone Modern Mailbox with Lock fits into our collection, but other homes receive mail closer to the front door.

For those setups, Post & Porch also offers a steel wall-mounted mailbox lock designed to work with The OG, The Inbox, The Short Stack, and more. The mailbox lock kit uses corrosion-resistant hardware, includes keys, and was designed to integrate with compatible Post & Porch wall-mounted mailboxes without making the lock the defining feature of the box.

We like having both options because “I want a locking mailbox” isn’t actually enough information to choose one.

Where does your carrier deliver? How much mail do you typically receive? How long does that mail normally sit there? What does the front of your home look like? Those questions are more useful than simply choosing whichever locking mailbox appears toughest in a product photo.

Security can’t make up for everything else. A mailbox still spends every day outside. It has to deal with sun, rain, snow, dust, sprinklers, temperature swings, and the occasional person who closes the door with considerably more enthusiasm than necessary. It also has to hold the mail you actually receive. And, because you’re probably going to look at it twice a day for years, we think it should look good doing all of that.

That’s why the Malone Locking Mailbox still starts with the same fundamentals as the rest of the Malone family: durable galvanized steel construction, powder-coated finishes, useful capacity, a clean post-mounted profile, and the ability to coordinate the mailbox with other details around the home.

The lock is one feature.

An important one, certainly.

But it shouldn’t have to become the entire personality of the modern mailbox.

There’s one decidedly unglamorous part of locking mailbox shopping that’s worth getting right: USPS requirements.

Locking mailbox designs are part of USPS curbside mailbox standards, but the carrier still needs to be able to deliver mail without using your personal key. USPS specifically states that mail carriers aren’t responsible for opening locked private mailboxes, accepting customers’ keys, or locking a mailbox after delivery.

Mailbox placement matters, too. USPS generally calls for curbside mailboxes to be installed 41 to 45 inches above the road surface at the point of mail entry and 6 to 8 inches back from the curb or road edge, although local conditions can change what’s appropriate. USPS recommends contacting your local Post Office before installing or replacing a post-mount mailbox.

That last call can save quite a bit of digging, measuring, reinstalling, and muttering in the front yard.

There’s another distinction worth making. 

Mail and packages increasingly arrive at the same home, but they don’t always fit in the same place. The Malone’s larger size can accommodate more mail and some small packages, but a locking mailbox can only protect something that can actually be placed inside it.

A large delivery left beside the post-mount mailbox or on the porch obviously isn’t protected by the lock on the mailbox door. For households receiving frequent larger deliveries, a dedicated package delivery box may make more sense alongside a locking mailbox. The goal should be choosing security around your real delivery habits rather than assuming one product solves every kind of delivery.

We’d rather make that distinction clear before somebody buys anything from our small Utah business.

Find out why we created The Safe Harbor, a secure package delivery box, here →

Post & Porch has changed quite a bit since Danny started selling magnetic house numbers at Utah farmers’ markets and home shows, but the original idea hasn’t changed much. Pay attention to the details outside the house that most people overlook. Make them more useful. Give homeowners better-looking options. Build products we’d actually want at our own homes.

That thinking eventually took us from house numbers to The Malone and from The Malone to a much larger collection of post-mounted mailboxes, wall-mounted mailboxes, address pieces, and other curb appeal products. Today, our small Utah team hand-builds personalized mailbox orders before they’re sent to homes around the country.

The locking mailbox became part of that story because usefulness means paying attention to how people live now. Sometimes mail sits outside longer, sometimes what’s inside it matters quite a bit, and sometimes the best improvement to a mailbox is one you barely notice when you drive up to the house. Until you need the key.

Shop The Malone Locking Mailbox here →