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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

> Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three.

... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.

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Here is what I hate about the USPS and spam. I opened a PO Box to receive rental payments on some properties I owned. The only people who got this address were tenants. It wasn't used for anything else. I'd check it once a month and it would be crammed full of ads. By crammed I mean seriously tightly wedged full of junk. I'd have to pick through it all to try and find my rent checks and not throw them out with the ads.

That was a pain but here's the question: How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active? If mail was going to it before I opened it, what did they do with it? I tried complaining but got the "we have to deliver every piece of mail regardless of the originator". My best guess is mail was being sent there from a previous user and while it was vacated they just threw it away or something. Once the new user (me) opened it back up I just started getting it all.

At one point I just let the junk accumulate to see what would happen. I'd get the "real" mail but the junk (which could no longer really fit) stopped showing up. Then I got a note that I need to clear it out more often or they would close it though :(

In Canada this is called Unaddressed Admail, and it allows companies to send flyers to entire neighbourhoods without having to address the mail individually. I'm pretty sure there is a way to opt-out.

I'm pretty sure they just pay the Post Office to put ads in every PO Box there.

Would there not have been an address on the mail?

I assume there's a list of valid PO boxes provided, much the way addresses are taken off of a list somewhere, addressed to "Current Resident", and delivered that way though the mail was not only obviously mass spam but not even addressed specifically to the resident.

US Postal makes money delivering marketing materials from local businesses (supermarkets and the like) to P.O. Boxes. They also offer no way to let you opt out of this.

This happens to me, too. I am sure I've lost important mail because it got mixed in with the crapmail. (OK, I probably don't get any important mail. But still, it worries me a little.)

I guess this isn't as bad as people that break into my building and shove their ads under my door. That really annoys me.

> How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active?

The post office told them -- hey sell their customer list.

I wonder if we ended the postal monopoly if we would see private carriers compete on quality of service by trying such things as not spamming you.

I think the current solution for snail mail spam is the optimal one. Consider the two possibilities: (1) the government raises taxes in order to increase the USPS's ability to handle spam or (2) the USPS offloads the majority of the filtering process to the recipients (the current solution).

On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.

No need to handle the spam, simply stop subsidizing it with a bulk mail discount. If they continue to send then the financial troubles are solved.

Last I paid attention the USPO claimed the spam was making them money, and I tend to believe it. The "subsidy" is just a price break for large customers, which many businesses do.

> No need to handle the spam, simply stop subsidizing it with a bulk mail discount.

The USPS claims that bulk mail more than pays its way. In fact, there's a federal law requiring that.

Yes, bulk mail does pay a lower rate. However, it must obey certain constraints which the USPS claims result in significantly lower costs. In other words, bulk mail is supposedly profitable even though they charge less for it.

If you're going to argue that they screwed up the accounting, you should show your work.

I don't think anyone is saying they don't make money off of spam, just that they shouldn't be encouraging it. If spammers had to pay full price perhaps we'd see less of it, or if not then the postal service would make more money.

If there were no bulk-mail discount, though, there'd be no way to get them to follow the USPS's constraints. The discount is what gets them to presort their mail, put bar codes on it, etc.

I think most people would be fine if there was a 5% discount for bulk mail, however they cut it way more than that.

Why not the stick, instead of the carrot? Make any bulk mailer that doesn't follow the rules guilty of abusing federal communications channels, similar to how we prosecute people who are misusing radio spectrum today.

We make things corporations do illegal all the time; it doesn't hurt corporate feelings, unlike restricting the rights of individuals. (And individuals, as far as I know, don't bulk-mail.) What would be the downside to this?

In other words, you want the USPS to discriminate on something other than cost of delivery.

Why should we enact your preferences instead of, say, mine?

Note that it's quite possible that spam is helping to keep first class postage prices down. (Eliminating 30% of the USPS's revenue does not eliminate 30% of their costs. FWIW, I suspect that direct mail is a greater percentage of their revenue than 30%.)

While you may willing to pay more to send USPS mail in return for getting less spam, other people probably aren't.

Which reminds me - you have gone to the very slight trouble of the first two steps listed at http://www.epa.gov/region1/communities/stop_spam.html , right?

Correct. Most bulk mail must arrive at the post office presorted, which saves the USPS from having to do it.

The problem is that bulk mail subsidizes the rest of the system. Now, you might say, then the system is flawed and perhaps a private solution would be better!

The problem is that the post office exists mostly because most rural mail costs more to deliver than the price. It is in the government's interest to make sure that it can send and receive mail to and from all pieces of the country (for taxes, the census, and for general commerce for rural areas. )

As such, bulk mail is a subsidy.

I doubt taxes would be raised for that since the USPS is a quasi-independent "federal corporation" and therefore doesn't use tax dollars to sustain itself.

The USPS by law has to be profitable. It is not funded by taxes.

(Although when there is a budget shortfall the government helps pay its bills.)

Law does not make reality. If it did, Obama can tomorrow sign a law saying that Government will reduce spending by 50% while providing more services. Obviously, the real life(TM) will safely ignore the law.

And I don't see a difference between whether USPS is directly funded by taxpayer dollars OR taxpayer are on the hook for unpaid USPS bills.

Maybe people get fired if it goes into debt?

It's surprisingly easy to opt out of a big portion of that spam.

-Stop credit card offers: https://www.optoutprescreen.com

-Stop supermarket coupon packages: Redplum (aka Valassis) by calling 888.241.6760

-Stop PennySaver: 1.714.996.8900, press 3, leave a voicemail message with your name & address, be sure to tell them you're trying to "stop".

Most of those coupon packages come from the same place. Hunt down the fine print phone number and you'll be off the list in no time.

I did this a few years ago and have been enjoying a relatively empty mailbox. I still get junk mail but very seldom.

I've outsourced my snail mail spam handling to a mail forwarding service called St. Brendan's Isle (there are others like Paperless Mail). They shred and recycle junk mail for me automatically. I never even see it.

I tried going through the process of unsubscribing and opting out of everything I could find, and while it slowed for a few weeks, it eventually picked up again (just like email spam, when you make use of "opt out" options). J. Crew were the most damnably aggressive spammers...after repeated attempts to opt out, they were still sending me two catalogs a week. I'll never make the mistake of buying someone a gift from J. Crew again.

Anyway, I needed a mail forwarding service, anyway, since moving into an RV, but this turned out to be an awesome bonus and I wish I'd set it up years ago. I will never be without a mail forwarding service again...for less than $20/month it's just too convenient to have someone else sort and scan my mail, and get rid of the garbage.

How can you be sure they're only shredding junk?

They shred bulk class mail. If it's anything important, I'm sure it is not being sent bulk class. And if someone wants me to get something enough to pay full price, then I guess I'll look at the cover, and maybe have the service scan the contents (the way it works with non-spam is they scan the cover of the mail, and then I can choose to receive the actual item in the next forwarded batch of mail, scan it so I can look at the contents online, or shred it and recycle it). The most egregious and annoying stuff is bulk mail.

Though I did, apparently end up on a Nationalist organizations mailing list, somehow (maybe through one of the various libertarian causes I've supported over the years; somehow there are ultra-right-wingers who think libertarians are sympathetic to their BS), so that's an annoying letter I've gotten recently that made it into the "look at the covers" phase. Since the word "Nationalist" was in the from address, I knew I could shred it immediately without opening it.

Oh, I just realized you might be theorizing that they might censor my mail. What they do is regulated by the federal government, and it takes roughly the equivalent of a power of attorney to let them open my mail. If they were ever caught tampering rather than acting as an honest agent, they'd be facing federal mail tampering charges. I don't have any reason to believe they would do that; they've been extremely polite, responsive, and they have excellent reviews. I can recommend them.

> ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.

A few years ago, I lived in Boston and traveled a lot of short trips for work. When I'd get back, my mailbox would always be crammed full of junk, crushing my mail.

One day, I ran into my postman, and I said, "Hey there, I travel a lot, I'm not gone long, but my mail gets crushed. Can I just leave a sticky note here and ask you not to deliver the ads to me? I don't want them."

He said, "Sorry, the post office is paid to deliver the mail, and that's what we do. We deliver all mail. You can ask the post office to hold your mail for you and go pick it up at the post office when you get back from traveling, though."

I was kind of stunned. Can you imagine a private business delivering you junk that you don't want and you can't refuse it? How outraged would people be if FedEx dropped off samples of cleaning products and miscellaneous junk and refused to stop, thus damaging your regular packages in the process?

The shipper is the paying customer here, not the person who receives the mail. How would you like it if the post office decided they didn't want to deliver something you mailed out? Or maybe you want them to start collecting money in exchange for not delivering mail? But only some mail - how are they supposed to know which you (and everybody else) want delivered? Can you imagine how expensive keeping a detailed list of what not to deliver to what address would be?

Good point! However, those spammers are doing some good because they're paying money to stamp their mail, which goes to employ mail personel, etc. For that reason I feel good when I throw away credit card letters while saying "Dear greedy creditor, No I don't want your raping fees, but thank you for paying money for me to throw this letter in recycling."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The window's broken either way. With snail mail, at least the one who broke it pays some of the cost of fixing it.

"[USPS] fiscal 2009 year-to-date net loss is $4.7 billion"

http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2009/pr09_066.ht...

That money didn't come out of thin air.. It results in higher fees for their customers which means the customer spends less with other companies who then don't hire people, etc etc.

Using your logic it would follow that email spammers are doing some good because they're using bandwidth (jobs for everyone from Cisco to ditch diggers) and create a market for people to combat spam. Stimulus!

Even better: Write what you say at your trash can on the offer, stuff that and every other piece of paper the CC company mailed you, and put it back in the business reply envelope. Now you've gotten the CC company to help the USPS twice.

ye its probably one of the only ones that spam is a good thing for it.

I would say 80-90% of the mail I get is spam.

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