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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

The brilliance becomes obvious when you combine it with the envelope sizes. Mailing things in the US always ends with you having to awkwardly tri-fold papers and hope that you didn't botch it, so that the result will fit in your envelope of a non-standard size.

Meanwhile, anyone can fold an A4 perfectly in half and it will always fit perfectly in a C5 envelope. Paper can't be folded? Mail it in a C4 envelope instead. Think a C5 is too big? Get a C6 envelope and fold it twice.

All the parts fit perfectly into each other, and it's obvious how they fit. Any size paper can be mailed in any size envelope simply by folding it.

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Right, it’s a great system! Concerning envelopes, here in Germany most mail I get is in DL envelopes, which also require the double fold. C5 is mostly used if double folding doesn’t work due to thickness.

> Mailing things in the US always ends with you having to awkwardly tri-fold papers and hope that you didn't botch it, so that the result will fit in your envelope of a non-standard size.

Just use the envelope to measure where to fold.

I live in Japan and the vast majority of mail is folded in thirds, just like it is in the US... Is using envelopes for paper folded just in half actually widespread in other countries?

Yes. They are the ones buying the C-series envelopes.

After a vacation in, then, Czechoslovakia I received a letter from the police. The letter was artfully folded so that the text would overlap at 90 degrees (if viewed with a light source behind the folded letter). I always reckoned that was done to scramble the letter from unintended reading.

Normally the C3 or C4 envelopes used by government would be printed on the inside with a mass of letters, but in a way that matched with how the letter paper inside would be folded.

In Denmark you can get the envelopes that will fit an A4 folded in half easily, but I’ve see full A4 envelopes and those which require four foldes more often.

But postal mail is almost a thing of the past. I think the last two “letters” I recieved was a new credit card and the keycard with one-time code for my government issued digital login.

Same in France.

The vast majority of envelopes are the long ones where you have to fold three times and you never get it right (but are hzppy if it still fits into the enveloppe)

C5 is very common in the UK, but Germany also mostly sends in thirds (DL).

Well, at least there is a limit to the folding. Good luck folding it a seventh time :)

I knew someone would point out that you can't fit an A0 paper in a C7 envelope. :-P

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