Have experiences with 'penpals' proven helpful?

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LINK to thread 'Any Experiences With Penpals?' was placed in the'Social Skills & Making Friends Forum' - as experiences gained through corresponding with penpals might just act as "a practice of sorts" in developing in-person friendships.

LINK for further details: Any Experiences With Penpals?
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I had a penpal as a kid. This was way before the Internet. We wrote letters to each other.

It wasn't a good experience. It wasn't a bad experience. It didn't last long.

When I was 12, I had a pen pal, and we exchanged "slot cars" - primitive electric racing toys that we had built. Six years later, we met through an amazing coincidence, and I was able to help him find a new home. We remained friends until chaos separated us. On the listservs, I met a woman who was perfect for a brief affair. Also there, I noticed that a guy who was successfully running a business and supporting a family was also an Aspie. I told him, and he was amazed and grateful, if chagrined.
Regarding personal email, one long-running exchange led to mild disillusionment. Several others have only produced interesting brainstorming, which is at least practice on this end. Keeping in touch with a distant friend now has me busy working on a contribution to a book he will also appear in. That link brought news of another friend of my best friend, who remains off-line.

I believe places still exist where one can race slot cars.

I had a few pen pals here and there when I was younger and snail mail was the only cheap way to communicate at a distance. It was OK but didn't usually last long. Most of them just stopped replying, with one or two of them I stopped. I guess we just got bored or ended up too busy with other things. Of course there's no rule that says these things have to go on forever. Dad (very likely an Aspie) had a few pen pals for a couple of decades or so, and got more out of it than I got out of mine. He and his snail-mail buddies were keen on zoology and ornithology so they'd mostly write about that. Some of them visited him eventually - they lived far away so that didn't happen often, but when it did I think it was a big thing for him, and they all seemed like really nice people. One of them lived in Cornwall and we had some great summer holidays there. The guy lived in an idyllic cottage in a tiny village with his wife, loads of natural and fostered kids, and various parrots, cats and dogs. I couldn't believe how calm and relaxed their lifestyle was. Dad might well have developed his writing skills with the penpal thing, and later he started writing lots of articles for small-circulation magazines, mostly about pigeons which he was really into. He was happy doing that and described himself as a big fish in a small pond.

Once the internet got going I moved over to exchanging emails with people, and I draw no big distinction between that and snail mail, except it's quicker and probably cheaper, and much more convenient for sending pictures and sound such as music files. Again, those correspondences rose and fell for much the same reasons. I suppose what with all the snail mail pals, the email pals and various forums such as this one, I've got better at expressing myself through words, though I was never bad at it, and had performed better at English than any other subject at school.