A curbside mailbox, door shut, its red signal flag cranked upright — the actual rural-route cue that outgoing mail is sitting inside waiting for the carrier. Almost nobody keeps that meaning straight in a text thread; most just grab it to mean 'you've got mail' in general.
What 📫 means
A blue mailbox placed with a raised red flag and a tiny silver or grey lock or latch on the top rim of the mailbox door. This entire structure is placed on a light-brown post.
The 📫 Closed Mailbox With Raised Flag emoji essentially represents the mailing system in the United States. The 'flag' also known as a 'carrier signal flag' in this case, denotes outgoing mail that is yet to be picked up.
How and when to use it
- While informing that your mail is ready but is yet to be picked by the mail person, use 📫. For example, "It's all ready. Just waiting to be picked for delivery 📫".
- 📫 refers to an outgoing mailbox that is generally not chosen over a singularly incoming mailbox. However, if you're sharing pictures, posts (no puns intended) on outgoing mail, you may use this emoji.
- You can also use 📫 to refer to postcards! If you're texting someone that you're writing letters or postcards or if you're sharing a social media story or post about this tradition that you follow, you can use 📫. Like, "It's been 12 years and we STILL send each other postcards! 📫".
- If you're sharing any postal news or anything informative with regard to a post office or all post offices in general, you could bring in 📫. Similarly, this emoji works just fine even for metaphorical applications of the same use-case.
Other Names
- 📫 Outgoing Mail
- 📫 Unreceived Outgoing Mail
- 📫 Outgoing Mail Yet to be Picked
- 📫 Mailbox With Carrier Signal Flag
- 📫 Raised Carrier Signal Flag on Closed Mailbox
- 📫 Closed Mailbox With Carrier Signal Flag
The lowdown
- Category
- Objects › mail
- Codepoints
U+1F4EB- Emoji version
- Emoji 0.6
- Shortcodes
:mailbox:- Keywords
- closed, communication, flag, mail, mailbox, postbox, raised
How it looks across platforms
Seeing a blank box instead of the emoji somewhere? Here's why that happens. Curious why the designs above don't match to begin with? Here's why that happens too.
⚡ Quick round
Which joined the keyboard first — 📫 Closed Mailbox with Raised Flag or 👩🚀 Woman Astronaut?