I get several calls a week from people who’ve lost their mailbox keys. Often they’ve already called their local post office because they’re under the mistaken impression that someone over there might give a flying fish. Some post offices will tell you to call a locksmith. I’ve heard rumors that some other offices will say that you can wait two or three weeks and pay $50 or $60, and the post office will resolve the problem. And some local post offices don’t even pick up the phone.

Mailbox clusters sometimes belong to the neighborhood association and sometimes belong to the post office. The lock attached to your box belongs to you. You can do whatever you want with it. The letter carrier doesn’t have a key to your individual box. If your box is in a cluster, he has a key that opens up the entire column of boxes at once. Don’t ever mess with the mailman lock that opens all the boxes at once. If you have your own standalone mailbox with a slot at the top, the mailman can’t get into that at all; he just drops your letters through the slot.

If you want to resolve this yourself, the first hurdle is getting the box open. Go ahead and find a bobby pin, straighten it out, and then put it under your pillow and spend a night dreaming about picking locks. In the morning, you still won’t be able to use that bobby pin to open your mailbox. Don’t even waste your time. But I know from experience that if you catch the postman while he’s delivering the mail, there’s a fair chance he’ll help you take off your old lock while the box is open. Be ready with a pair of pliers. The lock will usually be affixed with a clip that’s wedged between the inside of the door and the lock. Yank the clip out and the lock will come loose. In rare instances, the lock is attached with a nut that needs to be spun off. Once that’s all done, it’s your job to replace the lock.

The majority of mailboxes are outfitted with a standard-sized hole that’s sort of elliptical. Any mailbox lock you buy should fit into that hole. Some boxes (especially the big black ones with Wind locks in them) are so heavily painted that you need to run a file through the inside edges of the hole to allow aftermarket locks to fit in them. In general it’s easy to pop a new lock in. You can get one at Home Depot for $7. The hard part is finding a cam that fits properly onto the lock and holds the door snugly closed. (The cam is the thing that secures and releases the door when you turn the key back and forth.) Unless you’re like me and have a bucket full of cams, your best bet is to buy an identical lock to the one you have so that you can transfer the old cam to the new lock.

Some newer mailboxes have a tugboat-shaped hole in them. These are for the newer post-office-approved locks, which are labeled “USPS-L-1172C”. Once when it was raining and I was feeling lazy I decided to drill one of these out. Forty-five minutes later, I swore I’d never do that again. More recently I broke my pick off inside of one and it got so badly jammed in there that picking the lock was no longer possible and I had to drill it out, after which I swore I’d try my hardest to avoid having to do that again. You can get these locks from a local locksmith shop for about $20 after tax. Be aware that about 60% of the time you’ll need to know whether the lock is supposed to turn clockwise or counter-clockwise. The new locks will fit into the old holes, but the reverse is not true.

Before you bother with any of this, check the trap in your washing machine. If the key isn’t there, try looking deep in the pockets of that jacket you don’t usually wear but may have thrown on that one time last week. If you really can’t find it and don’t want to take this project on yourself, feel free to give me a call.