Your Philatelic Mail

When you buy something online and the seller uses stamps on the envelope to get it to you, what do you do with those envelopes?

1-Keep them whole,
2-soak off the stamps,
3-give them to someone/some group,
4-trade them with other collectors,
5-bundle them and sell them,
6-throw them away
7-???

Can you tell us about it?

What I do and what I think I ought to do are very different things. I have many hundreds of such envelopes littering the place because I don't do anything with them. There's lots of interesting stuff by now, but I have no idea who would find what useful. I don't want to give them to someone who is just going to cut the stamps off, even though in most cases that may be all something is good for. OTOH some of them have things like the $5 John Bassett Moore used when it was current. That's not in the same category, is it? When it comes to modern postal history, and covers in general, I am pretty much out to sea.

Stuff like this:

Toss them, don't collect anything past 1945 for the most part

Anything special or with an unusual postmark etc I keep intact. Other stuff has the stamps cut square and kept for later sorting... most tend to be junked after a while unless in a decent fine used condition.

I soak them, unless it is just an appealing looking envelope or if the stamps are contemporaneous. Alot of them I just toss because some dealers use damaged stamps or they use a glue stick for re-users.

I would say that what Mr. Stallzer has said is generally true for US covers.

There are some exceptions to that rule that I make for my own collecting interest. I will share them with you just to give you a slightly different perspective:

- Recent commemoratives on cover (especially as single-use for 1st class postage)
- High Value stamps on cover or piece
- Meters on on cover or piece
- Cinderellas/Local Post on Cover

Of course, for my collection the stamps must be in sound condition and cancelled.

I love it when I get clean hand cancels. The stamps are secondary.

If the commemorative stamps are on a regular piece of mail, I would typically keep the entire cover. On the other hand, most philatelic shipments are on bubble mailers or large, oversized boxes or wrappers that make keeping the entire cover impractical. In those cases, I would soak off the stamps and keep them in a stockbook.

Since I collect covers, I always keep them whole.

If the stamps get canceled, I cut them off and throw them into the on paper box, if uncanceled, it's gluestick.

I have about five banker boxes full of modern covers that only includes those in which the stamps are contemporary to the time of mailing. Today's modern covers can be tomorrow's desirable postal history - you never know. Most of the covers that have non-contemporary stamps tend to get broken down for soaking...eventually...more like a to do pile. Usually this includes the larger boxes and priority mail envelopes that are plastered with older issues. One of these decades I'll have to do something with the lot of them.

I soak them all.

Deleted

Since I do not collect US I trade them to other US collectors, My mail from Canada, stamps are soaked and in my collection, dupes go to Philb and gluestick go to my trading partner in Ottawa

..now there's a 5 dollar word...thanks
spain_1850..Its been a while since I used my dictionary