Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get why IRL mail spam is still allowed. It's a fucking nuisance. 95% of the mail I get is junk mail. Another 4% is recurring bill notices or something similarly low-value (yeah, I could probably make some of those go away by logging into whatever-it-is and checking a box somewhere, but it's overwhelmed by the junk mail anyway). Maybe 1% is something I actually care about. And I get a lot of mail.

I'd pay a fee for mail service if I must. Worth it. Just end unsolicited bulk mail, and make solicited bulk mailers ask me to opt in again every year or so, and stop on a negative response, or none at all. It's not free speech, it's my friggin' mailbox, and others shouldn't be able to damn near DOS it just because they want me to know about their special offer or lie to me about politics. I get that the postal service needs that money to stay afloat, hence my being cool with a fee of some sort replacing the bulk mailing.

For that matter, I'm not sure how a good portion of junk mail isn't fraud or false advertising or something along those lines. I get a lot of really deceptive commercial mail, pretending to be things that it isn't, like official notices, bills, credit cards (god those fake card advertisements are stupid), and so on.

> It's a fucking nuisance

It's also a monumental waste of resources: process trees for paper, process inks, print the spam, ship spam to distribution center, ship spam to local dispatch, drive spam to mailbox, recipient puts spam directly into trash, garbage collector drives to collect spam, dump spam into a hole in the ground, bury the spam.

While I'm sure it's inaccurate, that's about the gist of it, isn't it? You can substitute trash for recycling to get an equally pointless loop of wasting resources.

> While I'm sure it's inaccurate, that's about the gist of it, isn't it?

You forgot the waste of electricity and people-hours that is designing the spam. Otherwise, that's about it for the primary waste. There undoubtedly are second-order effects as well.

What's worst, this waste is practically unbounded. The answer to your competitor acquiring customers through sending out spam is to send out even more spam.

You can pay a fee to avoid mail spam. Just rent a Post Office box and they’ll filter all that stuff out for you. Downside is that they won’t bring it to your house.

If you want a post office that works for you and taxes you appropriately, amen. Some politicians believe that organizations like the post office should be privatized and taxes minimized, thus USPS is forced to find private revenue sources. The result is junk.

The egregious wastefulness of USPS junk mail is annoying and obvious, but at least it is visible to the average consumer. The wastefulness of online advertising is more insidious, because the average consumer does not see that their router is dutifully transmitting megabytes of tracking code, to be interpreted by their computer, to be filtered by ad block or (obnoxiously) shown to them. Just browsing your local newspaper site is similar in terms of wastefulness to recieving a handful of junk mailers.

> I don't get why IRL mail spam is still allowed.

Because bulk mail makes up the majority of the USPS operating budget.

So maybe let's shift some budget from EPA to USPS, given that killing off mail spam means that much less environmental damage to deal with.

Yeah, I should write someone in my country and make the same argument here. It's a fucking nuisance in Poland as well.

One day somebody - maybe the underpaid delivery labor, maybe some angry neighbor - dumped some of the spam that was left on the mailboxes all over the floor of our block of flats. Most of the leaflets were of a local pizza chain, so I got on my bike, drove over to them and rose a stink about it with their manager. Not sure if it did anything, but boy it felt good. It's probably wasn't even their fault - except it was, for printing and distributing this garbage in the first place. I think people need to start retaliating against the companies that advertise this way.

Back of the envelope (haha) we're talking somewhere in the range of $10-20/person/month, gross. Say half that after costs incurred by actually transporting and delivering that bulk mail (so, 50% profit, which seems high but is fine for the sake of argument).

I dunno about you, but I wouldn't just vote for a $5-10/month tax to eliminate junk mail entirely, I'd go door-to-door campaigning for it. I'd make signs. I'd call all my friends. What a bargain.

You've neglected methods and cost of enforcement. Getting rid of the bulk rate for spam would help tremendously, but even at higher rates it's still going to be profitable for a lot of companies. Real estate, credit card, and automobile companies are the first that come to mind for me.

Politically, I expect the American Postal Workers' Union will put up a tremendous fight.

This is one of those things that's so stupid and useless we'd be better off paying everyone concerned—the marketers, the artists, the copywriters, the postal workers, everyone—to do nothing, since the result of their work is actually harmful. These sorts of problems are just the worst. Probably right about the postal workers' union fighting it.

I'm wondering, in the absence of junk mail, if the post office could reduce prices on package delivery. I'm not sure where the main costs are, but if they're in the last mile... well now the post office would have trucks with a lot more space on them driving through the same routes anyway.

You do pay a fee for mail service. While USPS is not directly funded by taxes, it is funded by the Federal Government. Our taxes are responsible for financing the government's initiatives.

The problem is that the cost to bulk mail (at least 200 pieces) is merely $0.19 per piece. If you want to DOS an entire zip code regardless, EDDM is actually cheaper (per piece) at $0.187. USPS is getting that money. You would need to pay a fee higher than $0.19 per piece of junk mail that you receive for USPS to just break even.

That $0.19's not pure profit. There are fixed costs to providing service to all these addresses, sure, but even so, bulk mail has to add expenses on top of that, for transportation, storage, and delivery. The fee to end junk mail would only need to cover the net income from that, not the gross.

The USPS receives no federal funding.

It does get various breaks a private company wouldn't that you can argue amount to subsidies, such as not having to pay taxes. And it does have what amounts to a government-enforced monopoly on certain types of shipping.

But there is no funding allocated from the federal government to the USPS.

There's a large trash can right next to my neighborhood's mailboxes that everyone dumps the junk into with barely a glance - really illustrates how wasteful it is to be delivering it in the first place. It's a disgustingly huge trash can that has to be emptied daily.

Ha. I petitioned to our HOA to put a trash can next to every mailbox and they refused.

Write "not deliverable" and drop it back into the "outbound mail" slot? Or get a stamp with the same for even-less-work version.

Hah, tried that. The local post office will just deliver it to your mailbox again, and again, and again. My record is 3 times for a real piece of mail addressed to someone who used to live where I live. After that I just recycled it.

You have to cross out or write over the To address on the envelope. If you add some scribbles to a corner of the envelope, yeah, they won't notice and just re-deliver.

Of course I did that: I crossed out the address, and wrote in big black letters "return to sender, addressee not known at this address". That didn't help. I guess I should have used a sharpie to make the To: address illegible to prevent re-delivery!

I don't get why IRL mail spam is still allowed

Simple: it's a source of income for the USPS.

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