Yes, you can mail letters with wax seals through the United States Postal Service (USPS). The post office says wax can be used to seal parcels as long as the seal is “sufficient to allow detection of tampering.”
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Will Wax Seals Be Damged If Mailed?
The problem is, wax isn’t exactly sturdy and durable. After exchanging hands, running through various service belts, being compacted at the bottom of stacks of mail and packages, and the general rough treatment of the delivery, the wax may be disfigured.
The best way to send a wax letter in the mail is counterintuitive in terms of aesthetic presentation but necessary all the same. If you send a letter that has been sealed with wax, you should place it inside of a larger envelope, preferably one that has the interior lined with bubble wrap.
Delivery services will often offer a “hand’ delivery service (AKA Hand-Cancelled Mail, See below) for an extra fee, which means that it won’t get shoved through machines or otherwise handled with any degree of carelessness. It is still a risky endeavor, as you are entrusting a wax seal with a bunch of faces that you will never see and never know.
If you feel like that’s the way to go, you can always give it a try, perhaps with a test letter to see how it’s handled and whether or not paying the extra fee is worth the expenditure or not. Otherwise, it’s probably best to stick it in a box or in a protected envelope before you send it on its way.
Cost to Send a Wax Seal
On Twitter, the U.S. Postal Service said to be aware that wax seals can require extra postage. This is because wax used to seal envelopes will weigh more than normal envelope glue. If an envelope weighs over 1oz, you will need to pay $0.20 for each additional 1 oz.
What is Hand-Canceled Mail?
Most letters that go through the postal service pass through automated machines for sorting. However, because of the nature of the sorting machine, it could cause damage to non-standard envelopes. USPS offers a workaround for this issue, where they can sort the mail by hand. They call this hand-canceling or nonmachinable surcharges. The current fee for this service is $0.30 more.
