Usually no

We tend to put our houses in the center of our properties and often don't have any front-yard fencing. Making the mail carriers walk all the way up to every house would be prohibitatively time consuming. Without a fence, we need to put the letterbox on a post, so we use a mailbox.

You don't even have to be all that rural. If you have a single-family unattached home that wasn't built in a developer plan, you'll end up with a mailbox on a post at the road to one side of your driveway. Unless a specific location has a problem with theft, we don't even have a locking system.

In the newer planned neighborhoods, they'll set up cluster mailboxes.