
Before envelopes, people protected messages with letterlocking - fanf2
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-people-do-before-envelopes-letterlocking
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com2kid
I am sad that at no point in the text was it ever explained how letter locks
protect the letters!

A rather unfortunate admission from an otherwise great article.

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chrisweekly
"admission" -> "ommission"

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theoh
Omission, you mean.

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chrisweekly
facepalm (was too late to edit)

yes

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cantrevealname
The 20th century counterattack on letterlocking: The _CIA Flaps and Seals
Manual_ to covertly open your mail.

[https://www.scribd.com/doc/59705644/CIA-Flaps-and-Seals-
Manu...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/59705644/CIA-Flaps-and-Seals-Manual)

The book is from Paladin Press, a 1970s-era publisher of "hard to find"
information, and I don't see any evidence that it came from the CIA. But the
same or better techniques would certainly have been used by spies, government
agencies, and postal inspectors at the time.

It's funny to think about the hard work that governments had to do back then
to target an individual and read his or her mail. And people would have been
outraged if they discovered that their mail had been read. How times and
attitudes change.

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varjag
Of more recent vintage, in USSR it was common to zigzag or strike over the
sealed envelope lip with a pen.

I once did that on a letter to my friend posted abroad with his family. The
letter was returned, scribed over with "DON'T MARK!".

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pard68
Could you explain this more? What does it do?

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danielvf
It makes it more difficult to reseal in a non-noticeable way after someone has
opened the the envelope and read it.

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IshKebab
Although in practice you could just put it in a new envelope...

That actually seems like an advantage these letter "locks" have over envelopes
- e.g. the butterfly one uses the middle of the letter to form the lock so it
would be impossible to open it and then re-lock it.

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varjag
Then you'd need to fake the handwriting on the new envelope too. Which is
certainly could be done by Soviet security apparatus: they could even write
the whole letter, or even make you write the letter they want really. But it's
a lot more bureaucratically involved and requires totally different set of
skills than what a minder at postal exchange has.

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BrandoElFollito
And have appropriate stamps from all over the world.

People collect these so it may not go unnoticed.

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singularity2001
And before letterlocking people used envelopes, clay envelopes in Mesopotamia
that is.

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pbhjpbhj
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_\(seal\))

This article mentions clay envelopes which supposedly developed in to tokens.

