Did You Just Toss Some Postal History In The Recycle Bin?

One of my interests is early Vancouver Island postal history and the only reason I'm able to collect it is because someone set aside that letter they received a hundred plus years ago. Nowadays, not a lot of mail comes into the house and only a small percentage of that has a stamp on it, and only a small percentage of those items seem to be properly cancelled by the post office. A lot of bulk mail has no stamp at all. But it's still a valid and proper use of the mail system.

To someone who who loves to find a Small Queen or an Edward on an old cover, today's mail seems pretty boring. But I suppose that Small Queen looked boring 100+ years ago. Apparently, there were almost 1.4 billion (billion with a 'b') 3¢ Small Queens printed. There's a lot fewer stamps printed and used today, so those saved will be very scarce in the future.

So my question is: do you collect any incoming mail that might be considered "Postal History" a hundred years from now? And if so, what do you set aside?

There's a story of Ferrary acquiring a rare stamp on cover, tearing it off and chucking away the envelope. I'm afraid I do the same with post, before adding the stamp to the charity shop heap.

As a young collector my first captures were from the disposal bin in the post office's PO Box room. In there I would find volumes of mail - opened and unopened - just discarded. Sometimes interesting stuff. For a young collector.

I wouldn't say that I really "collect" them, but I do save some covers from my incoming mail.

I buy a fair number of stamps and postcards on eBay, and sellers of such items tend to use interesting stamps on the envelopes. People might consider them "philatelic", and a lot of the stamps are certainly being used "out of period", but if it's an attractive cover, especially if the stamps interest me topically, I'll save it. Otherwise, I'll just save the stamps to keep or to donate, if they're not damaged.

When I save my personal correspondence (much less of it in physical form nowadays), I save the envelope, as well, no matter how uninteresting.

I try to save all of the covers with stamps on them initially. After 6 months or so, I go through them and look for any EFOs to keep (I almost never find any), keep the best 1 or 2 covers of each variety of stamp. The others end up in the on paper box.
I am not sure what I will ever do with the covers.

I save advertising covers with interesting design elements, covers with plate number coils and covers with machine slogan cancels. Legible spray cancels from the states I collect get cut to 2 X 4's. The rest gets tossed.

Needless to say. the pickings are pretty thin.

Dan