Mitch,

Good to hear from you! You know me, if you title the email "No
comments please" I just have to comment ;-)

After hearing Randy and your arguements about the possible abuse of
allowing open commments on a listing of letterboxes, I tend to agree
that the risks outweigh the benifits. The problem I was trying to
address is what I perceive to be the exponentially increasing
difficulty of getting some idea what boxes are still live out there.
I remember Graham spoke of this problem in the UK and I would be
interested in finding out what they are currently doing about it
(apart from assuming boxes over X numbers of years of age are dead).

For the moment let's take the case of people who plant letterboxes in
areas they will not soon visit again (such as my South Carolina
letterbox). If someone were to ask me next year whether it is still
alive after a big storm comes close to the coast, I would have no
idea. It is in such a remote area of the country that someone would
have to expend considerable effort to go there unless they were
locals. There is no certain way to know any box is there at any given
time. However, I think that status updates by the box owner would be
very helpful. For example, although I might not visit my SC letterbox
again soon, I have placed postcards in there and could update my
listing when someone sends me one or tells me they have found it.
Upon reflection, in the future I think I will include a request in
all my clues for people to send me an email note whenever they look
for my boxes and let me know what happened. I can then choose to
update the status of any of my boxes based upon the feedback I
receive. The essential point being that the box owner chooses whether
to make the status info available and updates it themselves. Thoughts?
--
Regards,

Eric Mings Ph.D.