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Comment by girzel | Hacker News Reader

Dear "Seattle Woman": while you're in there, please dump Capital One's junk mail database, and set their address label printer on fire.

Sincerely, another Seattle resident with a mailbox.

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I took down the mailbox at my house and now use my business address for all my mail, because bulk junk mail doesn't get delivered to business addresses. Targeted credit offers do still get delivered, unfortunately. But the amount of junk mail in general is about 10% of what it was.

Works well, though I do often get accused of being a Unibomber type when I tell people they can't send mail to my house address because I removed my mailbox. The bank that holds my mortgage also came calling because the USPS declared my lot "vacant" to HUD after I did it, and that confused everybody.

> I took down the mailbox at my house

Serious question... is this legal?

Why would it be illegal to not have a mailbox?

It's your property. Do whatever you please.

Mailboxes live in this weird property-right limbo (that I don’t know really anything about) where the homeowner buys it but it is “property of” the US Postal Service. I found this[1] Supreme Court case that sort of touches on how the property rights work.

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/453/114/

I don't think that's what they're saying though. They're talking about what the mailbox while it's in use. I didn't find anything mentioning boxes being property of the USPS, they use the term "authorized repository." When it's in use, it's still property of the private entity, but it's usage is subject to the rules of USPS. (I'm not a lawyer)

My understanding it they can remove the USPS box (looking at what postal workers said on Quora), but they wouldn't be part of the mail system anymore. I guess they could have mail forwarded to a new box, or else it'd be undeliverable.

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/26/us/justices-upholds-law-p...

> Writing for the majority, Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist said that no one was required to receive mail or to have a mailbox but that once a postal customer provides a box for receiving mail he implicitly agrees to abide by postal regulations on its use.

Audio/transcript: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1980/80-608

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ should handle most of that. Yes, its legit [0].

[0] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0148-prescreened-credi...

Most useful tool (has been for a decade+) to stop the junk credit advertisements that many people don't know about.

Sorry not going to hand my SSN over to some random website to opt out from junk mail.

CO finally stopped sending me junk mail after I'd send back their offers with "stop sending me these" written in red crayon across the application form. I did it for months.

They really do send out a whole lotta junk mail, even here in Canada. I don't see other banks doing that.

Having a bigger marketing budget than everyone else is Capital One’s approach to banking.

Their mobile apps are top notch though. I used a card in the past and it came with free credit scoring and the mobile apps were better designed (UI and performance) than most. At least here in my country.

It even had automatic categorization of spending in a Mint.com style.

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