Where will these postcards go? (Shutterstock)

Some may say the written word is dead. Those people clearly haven't discovered Postcrossing.

With more than 200,000 members in 209 countries, this project aims to deliver postcards from complete strangers all over the world to each other's front doors.

"Receiving postcards always lit my day, and made my visits to the mailbox a lot more interesting," says Postcrossing.com founder Paulo Magalhaes. "Knowing for a fact that there were more people that enjoyed receiving postcards from far away, the idea of how to match them across the world came up." He launched the website on July 1, 2005 while finishing a computer science and systems engineering degree. Now, just a little more than five years later, postcrossers have passed the five million postcard sent milestone.

Louise Jolly joined up just a month after Magalhaes started the website and says she feels a bit like the ambassador of Postcrossing for Canada.

"It's amazing to see how Postcrossing has grown in five years," she said, noting when she began, there were just 443 users in 25 countries. Now, postcards leaving this country number almost 200,000.

Jolly, who lives near Kawartha Lakes, Ont. holds the title of having sent the most postcards in Canada (more than 1,400) and says Postcrossing allows you to "travel anywhere in the world right from your own home."

"I think being Number One comes with a certain amount of responsibility to represent our country well by being timely, informative and polite," Jolly says.

Like Jolly, Marian Munro from Halifax, Nova Scotia has picked up the hobby. Munro has collected vintage postcards for more than 30 years and a friend told the museum curator about Postcrossing. She signed up more than two years ago.

"I realized that this could be a fun way to ensure there are lots of vintage postcards for my son, by sending and receiving them worldwide," she says.

Munro has sent more than 375 postcards, and says she budgets $50 every two weeks for stamps.

While most people sign up for Postcrossing as a hobby, Magalhaes said a number of people use Postcrossing for education.

"In schools, teachers — or parents in homeschooling — are using Postcrossing in creative ways as a teaching tool. Postcards coming from far away make kids interested in geography, English and even other cultures and societies. Its randomness helps in learning about places that might not be so common in textbooks too," he explains.

But Mardi Desjardins of Winnipeg thinks Postcrossing is also giving her an education.

"I am learning things about our world and its people. I have at least heard the names of most countries of the world but have little knowledge of what many of them are like or what the history of those places is. More than once, I have received a card that has sent me on a little research mission to learn a bit more about something the card told me about," she says.

Magalhaes still sends and receives cards, and he says only some people recognize it's him on the other end of the postcard.

"I receive a lot of postcards — many members mail me just to thank for the project: it's a great community! Some people that get my address in Postcrossing recognize my account, but others don't — I enjoy it either way," he says.

As for a favourite, Magalhaes says "every postcard is special" and it's not just about the image on the front.

"It's what the person wrote, the stamp, where it came from and the distance it crossed to reach me," he says.

Postcrossing side

Postcrossing has become a worldwide project. Here are some of the 209 countries that are involved and how many users they currently have:

U.S.A. - 35,039

China - 20,907

Germany - 14,988

Finland - 12,687

Russia - 12,607

Taiwan - 12,169

Brazil - 6,946

United Kingdom - 6,285

Canada - 4,178

Australia - 3,679

Belarus - 3,451

France - 3,180

Italy - 1,732

Argentina - 1,409

Sweden - 700

Mexico - 602

Lebanon - 13

Afghanistan - 10

Haiti - 2

Soloman Islands - 1

Overall

210,675 members

209 countries

499 postcards/hour

Postcards have travelled 28,070,621,862 kilometres - that's 700,452 laps around the world.