AS E-MAIL continues contributing to the decline of snail mail, some Singaporeans are doing their part to keep alive an old way of staying in touch.

Around 1,500 Singaporeans, who call themselves "postcrossers", have been sending postcards to recipients in all parts of the world.

In return, they, too, receive postcards randomly from people they have never met, complete with handwritten messages like "Happy postcrossing".

A SingPost spokesman said that the volume of public mail here has declined steadily in the past few years.

The number of mail items handled by post offices here dropped from 149.5 million items between 2006 and 2007, to 134.4 million items between last year and this year.

Mr Paulo Magalhaes, the Portuguese founder of the global postcrossing movement, hopes to revive snail mail's popularity.

In an e-mail interview, Mr Magalhaes, 29, told my paper that he wanted to create "an online platform for this offline hobby".

He said that he had always enjoyed the surprise of finding something in the mailbox. He knew that other people also enjoyed it, and that the only thing missing was a way to connect them.

So, in July 2005, he created a website called the Postcard Crossing Project (www.postcrossing.com) to help these people get in touch.

Some 200,000 people from more than 200 countries have already registered on the site, and they each send an average of one postcard every month.

The website, which is run by a team of volunteers, maintains a database of all its registered postcrossers.

Education consultant Lee Ngian Kai, 65, Singapore's highest-grossing postcrosser, said he receives a postcard almost every day from a stranger living in another part of the world.

The former school principal has received and sent over 1,800 postcards since he signed up as a postcrosser three years ago.

He meticulously stashes them away in boxes, arranged according to their countries of origin and their designs, like those which portray scenes from the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

"It's interesting to see the myriad designs on postcards from all over the world," Mr Lee said in Mandarin, adding that he prefers postcards which depict scenic landscapes.

However, his hobby comes at a price. Last year, Mr Lee forked out about $600 to print 4,000 self-designed postcards featuring Singapore icons like the Merlion.

Still, that works out to just 15 cents a card, a lot less than the $1 price of a commercial postcard.

Mr Lee shares his hobby with his eight-year-old granddaughter, Alicia Lee. He introduced her to the activity two years ago and, today, Alicia's postcard collection rivals her grandfather's.

She has sent and received over 1,000 postcards and is ranked by the postcrossing website as the fourth-most-active postcrosser in Singapore.

The CHIJ St Nicholas Girls' Primary School pupil can even figure out a postcard's place of origin simply by looking at its country code.

"I would look at the world map to find out where the country is," she said. Her favourite postcards are those which depict animals and those with Hello Kitty prints.

Mr Magalhaes would undoubtedly be pleased. He said: "The goal is to...connect the world to a global mail network that overcomes borders, age barriers, genders, and even political and religious beliefs."

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