Lots of folks on rural northern roads with heavy snow fall use swinging
and self centering mailboxes. Main post comes straight up, has a 45
degree bend at mailbox height. Slip a pipe with a cap over the bent
portion, weld on a horizontal pipe with a suitable brace. Mount mailbox
at the end. When the snow plow comes by, the force of the snow will flip
the box up and it recenters. Ours got flipped up multiple times per
winter, the plow operator would deliberately drop the wing plow down in
front of the mail box to dig a path to the box. If you watched him,
you'd think he was trying to get the most windup on the box. Then again,
maybe he was!!!

Ignoramus1723 wrote:

Some dumbass knocked over our mailbox. It was clearly due to
stupidity, the tracks on the snow show that it was done at slow speed,
the person driving the car left various pieces of his/her mirror, most
likely when he or she was maneuvering. The tracks show that the person
reversed direction shortly (6 ft) after hitting our mailbox. Whatever
damage was done to our mailbox, the damage to the car was 5x that.

I heard a suggestion somewhere to mount mailboxes on spring type
mounts, like garage door springs. The idea is that collisions like
this will only make mailboxes bounce and return to the original
position. I really like this idea, has anyone done something similar?

i