For two-year-old Taiten Staib, checking the mail is the best time of day.

Every afternoon when he hears the postman's bike charging up the street, Taiten and his four-year-old brother Zayne light up with excitement.

They run as fast as their little feet will carry them to see what delightful surprises are waiting to be snatched from inside the letterbox.

It might be a birthday card from grandma, the latest toy catalogue, or even bills for mum - but as long as the postman has something to deliver, the Staib brothers are happy.

"He hears the postman come and runs out the front door straight away to get the mail," the boys' mother Natasha said of Taiten.

"He's been doing this ever since he could walk - him and his brother actually fight over who gets to collect the mail.

"They love running out and seeing the postman - to them he is sort of like a policeman or an ambulance man - and being in a small town, if they are out there early enough, the postman hands the mail right to them."

The Staib family live in Chinchilla, north-west of Brisbane.

But it seems the excitement people like Taiten and Zayne feel as they discover what mysteries lie nestled under the lid of their letterbox each day is at risk of dying out.

In fact the letterbox itself may very well be at death's door.

Letterboxes are becoming more and more redundant as electronic mail forces a decline in the number of letters which need to be delivered by hand.

Australia Post recently flagged the idea of community mail hubs, and says the letters market is forecast to decline a further 4.3 per cent over the next three years.

Australia Post's Queensland communications manager Simone Kurtz says the concept of community mail hubs has been successful in Europe and Canada.

"The idea is to use them in new housing estates - to build a sense of community within those new estates whereby there is a central point," she said.

"You'd have local shops where there would be a hub of mailboxes where people could collect their letters and parcels from those hubs with a personal pin.

"Further down the track there would be the option to be notified by SMS for mail to be picked up."

While Australia Post says there are no immediate plans to go ahead with the mail hubs, Ms Kurtz says the decline in mail volume coincides with an increase in the number of properties around Australia.

"We're having an increase in the number of properties or delivery points and then a decrease in the number of letters coming through the system," she said.

"The electronic age has played a part in that, so as we progress in the future we obviously need to identify the best methods of delivery that suit various communities."

Naked without a letterbox

But those within the letterbox industry say there is nothing to fear.

Mark Valentine has been selling letterboxes for 20 years and says without a mailbox, a house is naked.

"When you think about it, it's the dominant place that a person advertises their street number, so once you take away the mailbox you take away a certain aspect of the house that is an integral part of it," he said.

"The mailbox is the entry statement to the house, when people look for an address they look for the mail box because they expect the house number to be on there."

Mr Valentine says these days, people are enthusiastic about choosing the right letterbox for their home.

"Once upon a time there were probably only about two or four different styles of letterboxes in the market... now there are probably over a hundred different models of mail boxes available," he said.

"The very first style of mailboxes that became popular was called the pillar mailbox; that was the start of the new trend in fashionable mailboxes.

"That was followed by the small milk can mailbox, which was adopted from what they were doing in rural areas - using old milk cans to make mailboxes - and it just started to grow from there."

He says there has been a definite shift in how people view their letterbox.

"The average mailbox in our shop takes about half an hour to sell, people don't come in and just impulsively pick out a mailbox and walk out," he said.

"If a man comes in to buy a mailbox he'll say, eight times out of 10, 'Look, I'm going to send the wife in'.

"So there has been a shift into aesthetics, getting the right mailbox that's going to match my house."

Michael Ingram knows this shift all too well.

Four years ago he built his very own custom letterbox to match his new home - now he has a full-time job doing the same thing for others.

"I built a home, went out to purchase a letterbox and there was nothing around, so then I decided to build one," he said.

"I would get people knocking on my door asking where I bought it and then I just started making it part-time and then it became a full-time job."

Mr Ingram describes the letterbox as the "gateway to your home".

"People think 'gee, that's a nice letterbox' and then they want to walk inside your home... a letterbox just finishes the house off, it presents it," he said.