so how does the mail system work on campus?

<p>I'm wondering how students get various letters and packages sent to them. not all of them can have a PO Box. How do people send these things, and how do the colleges make sure this mail is secure?</p>

<p>everyone (or at least, everyone who lives on campus… I think everyone though) at my school had a PO Box at the student center. Mail goes in there.</p>

<p>Packages go to the campus post office. They put a slip in your mailbox, and you take the slip to the post office, and they give you the package / you sign for it.</p>

<p>^Yup. Everyone has a mailbox. Mail goes there. If we get a package that doesn’t fit in the box they send us an email and we have to go and show our student id card and then sign for the package and stuff.</p>

<p>As a note, I don’t think your mailboxes are actually “PO Boxes” as rebates and other such things that have stipulations like “No PO Boxes Allowed” have no problem sending stuff to you while you’re at college. It’s likely because it’s an address assigned by the school and not one being rented out.</p>

<p>Student mailboxes won’t generally be counted as PO boxes for stuff that excludes PO boxes; that’s more about preventing fraud than anything else, and since not just anyone can sign up for a mailbox on a college campus, it’s not really an issue.</p>

<p>At my school, letters and small packages go to mailboxes in the lobby of each dorm building. For packages you get a package slip, and you go to the mail room to sign for it. It’s actually sometimes easier to get packages when you dorm than otherwise, since some companies will insist on not leaving the damn thing if no one’s there to sign for it. It’s really random–package with two t-shirts needed a signature, package with a Wii Fit in it sat on my doorstep at my apartment all day. At least when you live on campus there’s always someone to sign for it at the mail room.</p>

I’ve got a question , Can I send a package of some sort (like art or a present) to a person that might not live in campus but definitely goes to that college? I’d like to send some mail but I don’t know if I can send it like this.

If they don’t live on campus, you have to send it to their apartment or house or whatever. The university isn’t a mail center for people who don’t live there.

Also, if you don’t know whether they live on campus or not, then maybe you shouldn’t be sending them mail… That just seems almost weird to me, that you would send someone something, but not be close enough (?) or for some other reason not know where they live.

Not always true. All Brown students have mailboxes on campus regardless of residence: http://www.brown.edu/about/administration/mail/student-mail-policy-general-service-information

EDIT: Actually, the sentence I was using could be interpreted to mean that any community member can send things free of charge by dropping mail off at the office. Reading another page made it less clear if off campus students maintain mailboxes, I don’t remember and so I might have been mistaken.

My bad, I stand corrected in the case of Brown! My university (46k students) doesn’t have the room to provide mailboxes for people who don’t live on campus, so that’s what I was basing my comment on.

I agree with elliebham, though, in that the best course of action is not to blindly send packages into the void but to ASK the friend where they live, haha.