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Comment by ttGpN5Nde3pK | Hacker News Reader

We are still drowning in paper spam. This is yet another area that is ripe for *reducing emissions and impact on our environment* that can only help everyone involved _except_ for companies that spam(scam in many cases), yet it is allowed to just continue.

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In my experience lots of unwanted mail comes from credit card offers, insurance, etc. Turns out that unless you have an account with them, all these financial service companies get their prospective mailing data through the credit bureaus. However there is a 2003 law that required the bureaus to create an opt out mechanism, which is available here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.

One of the problems I have with websites for official interaction with US government stuff is that, a lot of times, it's some random .com website or a 3rd party with no direct integration with the government entity they're interfacing with. This site has all the potential hallmarks of being a scam, so if I just found this on my own I would have a hard time believing it would work after giving it my personal info.

For sure. Except I don't think this site provides "official interaction with US government stuff". My expectation is that the government was involved only to create the regulation and the implementation was left to the credit bureaus. Which of course are incentivized to make the conversion rate of this site as low as possibly. So offputtingly sketchy is probably a good thing for them.

I simply took my mailbox down a few years ago, and have everything sent to my work address, since USPS doesn't deliver a lot of the paper spam to business addresses. It works pretty well at reducing the crap I get in the mail, as well as protects my privacy, but holy heck do you break the system without a residential mailbox. From having the USPS tell HUD that my house lot was abandoned, to people accusing me of being a Ted Kaczynski, to not being able to get the free Covid tests the feds sent out, it's crazy how much people just can't handle you not having a residential mailbox.

There are also various businesses that sell mailboxes (with a regular address, unlike P.O. boxes that are more limited) and these are business addresses. I hadn't thought of that advantage before. I also have a residential addresss where I live but having moved a number times without forwarding and not using it for anything but a few heavier packages I only get the large weekly circular and maybe one other ad from a local business per week.

That won't change while the USPS continues to give massively preferential rates to spammers.

I find paper spam much less problematic because it doesn’t interrupt me repeatedly throughout the day.

And the senders are much less likely to be able to get away with sending malware

When this came up in the context of Bitcoin, my back-of-the-envelope calculations were that Bitcoin and US spam paper mail were roughly the same order of magnitude, close enough that I couldn't say which was actually bigger with the error bars on my envelope.

Ban enough things like that and soon you're talking real impact.

A frustrating thing is that it’s cheaper (per letter) to send bulk mail with eg franking or giving letters to the post service pre-sorted.

On the environmental side, if your paper is made from reasonably sustainably sourced wood, isn’t throwing it into landfill a form of carbon sequestration?

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