The Royal Mail Group Limited, trading as Royal Mail, is a British postal service and courier company. It is owned by International Distributions Services. It operates the brands Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide (parcels). The company used the name Consignia for a brief period in the early 2000s but changed it afterwards.
The Louth-London Royal Mail, by Charles Cooper Henderson, 1820
Edinburgh and London Royal Mail, by Jacques-Laurent Agasse
Lower Edmonton Royal Mail sorting office, in London
Pillar box dating from the reign of Queen Victoria
The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal systems have generally been established as a government monopoly, with a fee on the article prepaid. Proof of payment is usually in the form of an adhesive postage stamp, but a postage meter is also used for bulk mailing.
A postman collecting mail for delivery
Many early post systems consisted of fixed courier routes. Here, a post house on a postal route in the 19th century Finland
The use of the Scinde Dawk adhesive stamps to signify the prepayment of postage began on 1 July 1852 in the Scinde/Sindh district, as part of a comprehensive reform of the district's postal system.
China 4-cent on 100-dollar silver overprint of 1949
