A couple of months ago a backpacker told me about a 'trick' that would enable me (as well as anyone else) to send free postcards worldwide via snail mail… say what?!?
He was sure that by drawing the wording STS where the stamp is supposed to be, the postcard would make it to its final destination
I didn't have much faith in it, but after a quick google I decided to give it a go and wrote a nice message on a free postcard and sent it to a friend in Italy, with my handwritten STS as a stamp.
Guess what? The postcard arrived today! So it's not an urban myth!
Does anyone know why this works? My friend wasn't asked to pay for postage or anything…
The old Student to Student trick. "S2S", "2-FA-BE" or "2FABE" also work apparently.
It's mainly a European thing (for some reason Australia will send STS stamped cards to Europe) and there is no guarantee that the post office will let the card fly for free but in a majority of cases (on the order of 80% or more), they do.
There's all sorts of urban myths around "STS" being some free initiative for backpacking, cash-strapped students in Europe to be able to write home when they were caught short of local currency, but really it's up to the post office in question as to whether they'll handle postcards that don't have postage, either because they don't really check, or as token of generosity to tourists.
Laid-back or shall we say, pay-off-friendly nations who don't like rules & regulations, like Italy, Greece and Spain will probably accept all the STS postcards they get because tourism is a huge part of their economies. Germany or somewhere more Northern might not though and will either return to sender or demand payment from the recipient with a "Postage due" stamp.
Really though, you could send a number of postcards with any gibberish sequence in the stamp window and some of them probably will get through to their destination.