No Mailbox Is Safe
During an especially snowy winter, mailbox casualties are a fact of life in the 518.
Two big storms ago (or maybe it was three?), my mailbox got a love tap from a passing plow. It wasn’t knocked over, but the door is now hanging on by a single hinge. When I went to Home Depot to get a new one, an employee told me, “it’s been a great winter to be a mailbox salesman.” Indeed, everywhere I go, I see mailboxes decimated by this season’s unusually active fleet of snowplows. Is this just a fact of life in upstate New York? Is there anything homeowners can do to keep their mailboxes safe from the threat of destruction? Is it up to the homeowner to replace mailboxes that have been taken out by plows? This week, I called in Capital Region Living writer Sara Foss to investigate.
—Natalie
Come winter, the town of Halfmoon prepares for the inevitable by purchasing roughly a dozen mailboxes. That way, when a snowplow knocks over a mailbox, the highway department can quickly replace it.
“We’ll just put them on the shelf here, and that way, if we take out a mailbox, we can go take care of it,” says Bill Bryans, Halfmoon highway superintendent.
Halfmoon’s mailboxes have suffered more plow damage this year than in recent years; Bill estimates that his plows have taken out about 20 mailboxes in what has been an unusually snowy winter. “We’ve had a New York winter,” he says. “We’ve plowed almost every day for the last month. The more the trucks are on the road, the more opportunities there are for things like that to happen.”
New York municipalities aren’t required to replace or repair mailboxes damaged or knocked over by plows during bad weather. The New York Attorney General has said that mailboxes are private property placed in public right-of-way, and that municipalities aren’t liable for damages caused to mailboxes during the routine removal of snow.
That said, Halfmoon and many other local communities do take responsibility for plow-mailbox mishaps, often purchasing mailboxes in bulk from local hardware stores to be deployed as needed.
In 2025, the City of Saratoga Springs replaced or repaired 46 mailboxes. This year, Saratoga Commissioner of Public Works BK Keramati says, “we are seeing a little bit more failures of that type”—though the level of activity isn’t unusual, given the amount of snow.
Some mailboxes are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. One friend in rural Saratoga County told me this is the first year that her mailbox hasn’t been hit. “We’re on a county route, so every year a Saratoga County crew shows up, and either fixes the post or gives us a whole new mailbox and post.”
Some homeowners get creative to protect their mailboxes from plows.
Rensselaer County resident Annette Chesser made some modifications to her mailbox after it was struck by county plows on three different occasions. “The mailbox is on a slight curve, and they would cut the curve a little short, and they’d whack the mailbox and destroy it,” she says. Though the county provided new mailboxes, Annette had to pick them up and install them herself.
“I decided I needed to figure out how to make this work better, because they aren’t going to change how they plow,” she says. Her solution: She moved the mailbox farther away from the curve, reinforced it by mounting it to a piece of wood, raised it, installed reflective decals, and made it so that the mailbox actually pivots when hit. “It still gets hit once in a while,” she says, “but it spins away a little bit, and I can pull it back.”
“I’d rather the plow take out a mailbox than hit a car.”
If the Town of Halfmoon finds that a plow wrecked a mailbox in good condition, and the post wasn’t rotted or the box rusted, it will replace it with a standard metal mailbox with a four-inch pressure-treated post as a courtesy, because, Bill Bryans says, “we do feel bad if we hit them.” What the town won’t do is replace custom or decorative mailboxes.
The same is true in Saratoga Springs, where Comissioner Keramati once dealt with a homeowner with a fancy mailbox that cost thousands of dollars. The city repairs mailboxes as best it can during the winter, but “when the weather is better, we go back and replace,” he says. “When the ground is frozen, it can be pretty hard to drive a post in.”
Bill understands first-hand the challenges of plowing, because he does it himself— usually a small route in his pick-up, though he sometimes takes out the bigger plows. “There are occasions when you have traffic coming at you from the other direction during inclement weather, and it’s very tough to see,” he says. “The car could be a little too far into our lane, and we have to try to avoid it. I’d rather the plow take out a mailbox than hit a car.”
Two of the bigger plowing challenges are people parking in the road at their developments during bad weather, creating obstacles for plows to get around, and people putting garbage cans in the road.
Sometimes a mailbox is damaged when a plow hits it, but sometimes it’s the wet, heavy snow coming off the vehicle’s wing that knocks over a mailbox.
Mike Monroe, Highway Superintendent for Wilton, says property owners can make it easier for plows and mitigate potential damage by clearing the snow from around their mailboxes. “It’s been a challenging year with the amount of snow,” he says.
Wilton will repair or replace mailboxes, though there are exceptions: The town won’t replace or repair plastic mailboxes or posts, because the cold makes the plastic brittle and more likely to break when exposed to the elements. Each winter, the town purchases a pallet of 40 mailboxes; Mike says his department is still working through this year’s supply.
Inexperienced drivers, Bill says, are more likely to hit a mailbox, though he’s found a way to cut down on the number of boxes hit by new plow drivers. “They learn very, very rapidly,” he says, “because my policy here is that if you hit the mailbox, you’re the one that’s going to go out and fix it.”
—Sara