My mailbox was destroyed by the snow plow. Has anyone used the snow plow resistant mailboxes? There are different types online and they all seem expensive. A few of my neighbors have theirs built into a stonewall that look pretty indestructible but someone told me that there could be a liability issue if someone ran into it and was injured. I don’t know if that is true or not, I just want one that will survive several winters before it needs replaced. Any suggestions? Thanks!
I saw one like this in a suburban street.
It moves if hit and is not in the ground, but the base is concrete inside a truck wheel that will roll out of the way and can be rolled back in place:
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Thanks! That looks like a serious mailbox!
We did something similar to above, stuck the mailbox post in a 5 gallon bucket full of concrete. It would get knocked over by the plow/snow, stand it back up and you are good to go.
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I gave up. We are on the outside of a curve prone to drifting on a state highway, which means they drop the wing plows out and you can just forget the mailboxes. So, mine is now mounted on a sawhorse. And every snow storm, or before it ideally, I trot out, shift the sawhorse back ten feet and let it go. And then after the storm I trot out, shovel the spot (or use the tractor because I am there doing the plow drift for the drive anyway) and plop the mailbox back into position.
Several other houses in town have adopted this philosophy!
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A lot of people here have mailboxes hanging from 2 chains - either from an overhanging tree branch or a cantilevered arm (wood or pipe/metal. Sorry, no pictures - I tried to grab a Street View pic of my neighbor’s, but find they still haven’t driven down our part of the road.
Found a picture of the sort of thing online:
I don’t know if it would be accepted elsewhere. I asked about it when I had to replace a mailbox in a former home in Connecticut and they’d never heard of such a thing. Here, the carrier is used to dealing with them.
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There are also swinging mailboxes, pole back some feet, swinging arm forward that can be knocked out of the way and put back in place:
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Our mailbox has been taken out by the plow twice this month! So frustrating.
Our farm in Tennessee had a huge stone pillar with the mailbox embedded in the stone. The previous owners installed it and it had probably been there 40 or more years… until NYE 2012/2013 when a carful of teens obliterated it. It was a miracle they weren’t seriously injured.
When checking on zoning recently for a property we were looking to purchase, I noticed there was verbiage that mailboxes had to be of wood, plastic, or lightweight/hollow metal construction and were not allowed to be things like stone, brick, or solid metal structures. After seeing the state of the kids’ car after hitting our stone mailbox, I completely understand why!!!
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Thanks for all the suggestions! I hope to find one that is already assembled. I fear if I tried to make one myself it wouldn’t look much better than it does now with rope and duct tape holding it together. Really classy!
YMMV depending on your street. I did the same after someone RAN OVER my mailbox, snapped the post and I had no idea where it had been planted. Then my mailbox was always “knocked over.” I figured it was the wind from the semi trucks going 55 mph down the road. I screwed a board into the bucket/concrete, then put weights (shavings bags filled with sand) on either side–over the board and against the bucket.
Some of my neighbors have the mailbox rooted in a half barrel or similar planter type thing.
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I like the planter idea. It could be heavy enough to not to fall over but would move hopefully if someone hit it. Our road is a busy one and traffic flies on it. The 4x4 post snapped in half and the mailbox is smushed. Right now the broken half is stuck in a snow drift and I wrapped duct tape, furnace duct tape and a rope around to the mailbox to hold it in place. Its really pretty.
Where I live in Michigan, rural mailboxes are less likely to be hit by the snowplow than the snow the plow pushes up. Many many homes use pallets or part of pallets set up “in front” of their mailboxes. Of course, the pallets have to be firmly planted—maybe rods through the pallet and then set in concrete in the ground? The pallets take the brunt of the force of the snow as the plows go by. And I expect it’s fairly easy and cheap to replace a broken pallet.
I don’t have to worry about this as my ‘city’ mailbox is on my front porch attached to my house. Still, we do have mailboxes set near some roads, and occasionally they are hit. As a (former) worker for the Department of Public Works, we got these calls. The procedure was to send the homeowner a form. The homeowner could replace and fix his mailbox, fill out the form, and include the receipt for the cost (up to a certain amount). Luckily, the number of mailboxes that were hit by City snowplows were reduced to maybe 5 (at most) per winter in the last decade that I worked.
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It is interesting that the city reimbursed the residents the cost (or partial cost) of the mailbox. I imagine Michigan gets some serious snow and mailboxes get nervous in the winter months. My area is supposed to have warmer temperatures next week so my mailbox support is going to melt. I will need to come up with a solution soon!
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I am going to have to keep this one in mind next time our mailbox gets pulverized by the plow.
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Of course some of it depends on the driver of the plow…this year, I probably could be leaving the mailbox in place; several years ago the driver for the route must have been either very new or very angry with something. He took out no less than thirty percent of the mailboxes on the hill, both sides, some multiple times, and snow guards didn’t slow him down much. At their bases, no less, so direct hit with the blade not the snow. If I had been his supervisor and saw the damage to the blade’s edges I would have been furious. That was when I went with the sawhorse, nothing like the post getting sheared off to defeat one.
The swing arm ones are nice, and if I ever get around to actually rebuilding the mailbox that is what I would go with.
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When we lived in Minnesota, pretty much everyone had one of these:
https://www.mcssl.com/store/swingclear
Was pretty surprised moving to CT to see it’s not considered a solved issue like in MN…so many different “solutions” with snow ramps and wooden a frames over boxes and whatever. Places with BIG snow solved this question a long time ago, I guess.
The return to center post I linked above fits our neighborhood aesthetic better, but if we lived on a state highway or similar road served by the big plows, the rural mailbox post from swing clear would do the job (as proven by countless MN roads!)
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I have that classy mailbox!
A tow truck took out my metal box set in a concrete base. Base sits on the ground, not in it.
I used a rubber mallet to pound it roughly back into mailbox shape.
Then tied it in place with baling twine & zipties.
Uber Classy 
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That’s it. I need a horse named Nervous Mailbox.
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