Who gets the money from my stamp when I mail a letter or a postcard (via Mailform or Docupost for example) from the UK to the USA or vice versa? If it’s the UK, how does the airline or the postman in the US profit on my letter? Also, Are they obliged to deliver it for free once it reaches the other country because they receive no direct payment from me? How can international mail help recipient countries make money?
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The sending postal service keeps all of the money.
However, some countries send vastly more mail than they receive, which is unfair to the receiving country — they have to process all the incoming mail but received none of the revenue.
So there is an international agreement where between country pairs, the country that sent more mail has to compensate the receiving country by a specified amount. This is called [terminal dues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#Terminal_dues).
For example, due to e-commerce China currently send much more mail to the US than the opposite flow, so China Post has to pay terminal dues to the US Postal Service.
**TL;DR**: the terminal dues arrangement has been tweaked many times since it was in was introduced in 1969 but the concept remains basically the same:
* Each country keeps all of the postage revenue, but they compensate each other when there are volume imbalances.
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