Who is responsible for his/her mailbox?

Questioner

We live next to a kind of courtyard, in a dead-end street, at the bottom of a dike. Now all the neighbours who live at the back of the courtyard next door have their letterboxes hanging on our fence. (Of 3 houses) They say this is necessary because their houses are only accessible via right of way, they live more than 10m from the public road. Now we have never made a problem of this, but now we have storm damage to the fence and the neighbours of 1 of the letterboxes expect us to solve this for the letterbox. I think this is quite crooked, it seems to me that the letterbox is their responsibility or am I wrong? The other 2 are hanging on another part of the fence, this part did survive the storm and these are still hanging, we are dismantling the blown over mailbox and placing the box from the blown over part on the ground with the other one for now. However, we want to change/renew the fence and would rather not have any mailboxes on our new fence. Do we owe the neighbors anything at all in this, can they demand that their mailboxes remain there? The part where it concerns is bordered by a public road and a road with a right of way, they hang on the front parts of our fence. Thank you in advance!

Lawyer

If these homes are not accessible via the public road, then there is no easement but an emergency route. This cannot be lifted. As far as the mailboxes are concerned, an easement has arisen and the entitled party will have to maintain or repair them at his own expense, not you. If the mailboxes can be located elsewhere on your property, then you can indicate this, or perhaps the easement can be lifted.