Covers: A response to "snail mail"

My dad is an avid collector of covers.  What are covers? you might wonder.

Covers are envelopes with their contents intact.  What?  Who would collect those?  Well, apparently there's a huge following of covers in the world of stamp collectors.  My dad will pay top dollar for a cover with the Howland name on it.  Among his found treasures:  a letter addressed to a Miss Deborah Howland in the 1800s.  My dad's first granddaughter is named Deborah Howland, so this is particularly relevant.

As it so happened, the cover's contents included a letter from a gentleman who was absolutely smitten with said Deborah and sought her return affections.  The handwriting was beautiful, the sentiment even more so.  My father was on a mission to find out whatever happened to Miss Deborah Howland - and he learned that she was not as smitten with the letter writer as he was her cousin and that would not be an acceptable liaison. 

Dad is an avid genealogist, right along with my brother Phillip - who has to do it as a part of the Mormon church philosophy.  My Dad does it because it's fun and interesting for him.  He's tracked Howlands all over the United States, particularly from New England to Mexico and the Sante Fe Trail (that one resulted in me finding a book from the Southern Methodist Library in Texas about the Sante Fe Trail to buy for my dad's birthday a few years back); another batch of Howlands who have spent a lot of time in Africa (Cape Fear) with their merchant pursuits.

All of this resulted from hand-written letters from or to a person named Howland ever since the U.S. Postal service began - which I venture to say was sometime in the early 1800s.  It has given my father thousands of hours of pleasure researching the whereabouts of certain family members so he can add to the Howland history.

I guess the point of all of this is:
1.  Don't throw away the envelope with that letter.  It may be worth something someday.
2.  If you get a personal letter in the mail, keep it in a special place with the envelope.  It's only valuable with the stamp and the hand-written scribe inside.
3.  Computers make it easy to correspond on a daily basis, but the "mass" is nothing compared to the personal communication.
4.  Good handwriting is an art form that is almost lost.