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Comment by everforward | Hacker News Reader

Just your phone? Practically every means of contact I have is flooded with useless crap messages. My phone, email, and physical mail are all nearly useless. I barely bother to check them anymore, because for every 1 legitimate message I get, there are dozens of spam ones.

> I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.

I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me.

I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.

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I don't think the physical mail problem gets talked about enough. Maybe it varies - because I actually don't have much of a problem with spam text messages myself - but one of the bigger chunks of my HOA bill lately is the cost of the daily emptying of a large trash receptacle by the mail boxes, because everyone opens their box and immediately dumps 90% of that crap into a shared trash can. What a waste.

I'm my HOA president right now and something that infuriated me is a Texas law stating we have to notify all residents of actions by mail. Nobody reads their mail and nobody should. We're a block of 6 townhouses and my farthest neighbor is 40 feet away. I see these people everyday and can just tell them, yet we're forced to send out a bunch of useless mail destined to be thrown away. We first noticed this when we saw a category of charge from the property manager related to mail. None of us want mail, but the state of Texas forces us to receive it anyway. They also sell contact info to marketers when you apply for a driver's license, so ever since they passed the law saying you can't vote with an out of state ID, that increased my spam levels, too.

So how in general should people be notified of official actions/activities? Just hope they find out somehow? It's not like most people read some local newspaper any longer.

Email.

But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.

I don't consider email a reliable/robust official notification mechanism. People have various emails, may or may not check a given email address, stuff gets filtered to spam, etc. It's almost certainly more trustworthy than it was a number of years back but if you want to send me an important notification, I want it to be first class mail.

The reliability of postal mail is circular. I only bother to check my physical mailbox because it's used for official notices, like ballots, jury summons, and tickets. If I could direct those to email, I'd lose the key and not regret it for a moment.

HOA actions seem like exactly the sort of thing I should be receiving by mail. I think this thread is referring to not wanting things like "To {YOUR_NAME} or Current Resident" or spam offers via mail, which are a waste.

Right. I'm sure most of would agree that we don't want to normalize robocall phone calls for anything that isn't really immediate and urgent. And failing that, email isn't necessarily reliable (spam filters/changes/getting lost in all the clutter), which pretty much leaves physical mail. So, yes, even if most people will just throw it in the trash I do want to receive notification of town meetings and other official actions that affect me by mail. I certainly also wouldn't want to normalize posting something on Next Door or Facebook to be a sufficient alternative.

Former attorney here - if you ever end up in some kind of dispute, you will be glad you notified people in writing!

I agree, that it's annoying in the meantime though.

I vividly remember the time my apartment complex scheduled a fire inspection and chose to forego the written notification required by California law, instead replacing it with an email. Too bad their property management dashboard was incapable of sending me email. I got a notification during a meeting with video showing people breaking into my unit. The police (just around the corner!) showed up before I could get home. It was a mess.

Don't rely on email for important things.

I opted out of "pre-screened" offers years ago, and I think that has helped a lot. I did the "permanent" version, but there is a 10-year one IIRC (at least when I did it).

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

They want my SSN to stop sending me junk mail? What a load of shit.

It's the credit reporting agencies. They already have your SSN/TIN, and use it to identify you in their database.

Yeah. Companies can purchase information from the credit bureaus and use it to target direct mail. Providing your SSN helps them match you, because it would be SO SO BAD if they accidentally opted out someone against their will.

After hearing about a Robin Hood breach where user's SSN is leaked, how bad is it to have your SSN breached?

It seems like they could just get everything about you. Total and complete identity theft

True, but if you're over a few months old, your SSN has probably already been leaked.

mumblemumble's reply is accurate, and the SSN is also optional. I'm not sure what in your opinion would make it any better.

Not having to actively opt out of piles of shit I never requested, maybe?

EDIT - can't get the form to submit without an error anyways. We're sorry!

An error has occured while processing this page. Please try again.

Maybe stamp that on the junk mail, and give it back to the USPS?

> An error has occured while processing this page. Please try again.

Same thing happened to me. I just refreshed the page, confirmed form resubmission, and it worked.

This works also. https://www.dmachoice.org

When I lived in Canada I remember they had a nifty solution. Put a green round sticker in your mailbox and the mailman will skip your inbox when placing crap mail.

At one point I got my physical junk mail load down to a trickle by writing "refused - return to sender" on it and dropping it back in the nearest mail box. The sender has to pay for return postage, so that will get you dropped off their lists right quick.

Unfortunately, it's high maintenance, and it doesn't take too much of a lapse to get back up to the usual junk load. But I occasionally like to daydream that, if we could get enough people in the USA to do this, the junk mail industry itself might become financially untenable.

>The sender has to pay for return postage, so that will get you dropped off their lists right quick.

Actually, returning an unopened USPS-shipped letter or package doesn't cost postage at all. They probably removed you since you essentially took the time to communicate that they're not going to succeed with any future mail.

I wonder what it would take to create private sort centers:

- slap “refused — return to sender” stickers on all the junk and drop it in bins for USPS

- bundle your actual mail and deliver it

Oohhh. This could be done without postal service cooperation. Just stamp all the junk mail, and put it in a curbside bin.

Once a month, a service pickes it up, then leaves a dumpster of spam next to the local USPS mail drop. (Or shovels it over the counter at the post office.)

Also, provide a list of houses subscribed to the service to the USPS. The ball's in their court now!

I don’t think you’d need more than regular business service:

- postal worker comes every day, with pre-sorted bins and leaves with outgoing bins; businesses already do this.

- first you re-sort the pre-sorted personal mail to remove spam, preserving the post office sort to keep it by customer

- then you sort all the removed junk by sender you’re returning to

— and when your next mail arrives, you give the USPS worker the pre-sorted outbound mail of returned junk

- keep a Instagram of your piles of returned junk mail, every day

This already happens with, eg, university or large office mailrooms. So you’re not asking anything new if USPS to make it work.

I have a PMB (I've tried https://virtualpostmail.com/ and https://earthclassmail.com/) and never receive any junk mail. They either scan your mail to PDF, or bundle it and forward it to another address like your home. For some reason which I don't understand, marketers don't send junk mail to PMBs.

I've tried this before, writing "return to sender" on spam, except was putting them back in the mailbox with the flag up. The mailman threw a minor fit after the 3rd or 4th time I did it, left a note in the mailbox complaining about it, and started circling with a pen "or Current Resident" on every piece of junk mail. I quit after that because pissing off the mailman is not worth it and I wasn't about to take the fight anywhere past that.

I like those little business-reply-mail envelopes. I tear up everything and put it in those envelopes and send it back. They DO have to pay for those to be returned.

The waste is a problem, and another big issue is that it undermines the purpose of the USPS. A major reason why the USPS was created and continues to exist is because the government needs to be able to contact people. Taxes, censuses, legal proceedings, etc, there are a lot of times the government needs to be able to contact people.

Allowing bulk spam mail to use that channel of contact is contrary to its purpose. It's not a place where I get high priority messages with delivery confirmation to make sure I get them anymore. It's a place where random flyers get stuffed, and the government insists on mixing their messages into that stream of crap.

USPS should stop bulk delivery entirely and have FedEx and UPS do it. They're not allowed to put stuff in my mailbox (and literally can't, because they don't have keys). At least then we restore the line. Things in the mailbox are important. Things that get left on my doorstep might be, but probably aren't.

But USPS is underfunded and according to the source below they made $13.9B from marketing mail in 2020. As long as USPS is underfunded it is a necessary evil.

https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/2062562/

I never cease to be amazed how much I pay in taxes and then whenever there is a government service that is necessary or desirable for me, I have to pay to use it or endure shit like this to subsidize it.

Well for one thing you're also subsidising ('subsidising') all the people who earn less and pay less tax than you; not to mention all the people who are net paid by taxes.

I've never lived in the US and I do hear that perhaps it isn't particularly efficient with tax money, but still, if you looked at the average tax paid instead of your own it might not be nearly so amazing?

A good reference?

https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue

I'm not sure what other things to take into account. For example it says tax collected in Luxemberg is $44k per capita. Vs USA at $16k per capita. I'm sure another issue is 20% of USA taxes going to military?

Of othe places I've actually spent significant time, Singapore and Japan seemed to have pretty great government services and their taxes collected per person are lower than the USA. But I also know their cultures are different and that there are less people that need government support

> But USPS is underfunded and according to the source below they made $13.9B from marketing mail in 2020.

I would happily pay (napkin maths) $40-50 more in taxes per person per year to make this fucking stop.

Shit, it'd save my city some money. Less trash.

I'd happily pay zero more taxes, and have the USPS properly funded using money that used to pay for overpriced cruise missiles or Navy ships that don't even function.

I think you're heavily in the minority here.

Just one hour a year at median individual hourly income lost to junkmail and you're, what, at least halfway to that cost? One important missed letter every few years can easily cause more harm than several years of that fee. Seems like a good deal to me, even if I'd rather (as another poster wrote) just spend slightly less on the military and give it to the USPS to make this stop.

Go the other way. Charge the spammers more for delivering their trash.

No, this won't eliminate it. It will give you less of it, though, and give the USPS more money. Win/win, even if we don't win as much as we would like.

Bulk mail currently gets a discount compared to individual letters. Eliminate that, and we'd see less bulk mail.

This discount is what got brought up when I complain about this on NextDoor and Facebook. Local business owners who are contributing to the spam, whose circulars are among those I just immediately throw in the trash, don't want to pay more. I'm very curious if they actually track the ROI on that advertising. I've asked - one local business found they got nothing from mailings anyway. But that's just a sample size of 1.

You are in the minority. As evidenced by the proliferation of overlay ads in their smart TVs, people are extraordinarily price-sensitive when it comes to something they can put a hard monetary value on. "This costs you $50" is something people are significantly more hostile toward than "This costs you some of your time, attention, and peace of mind" because in general we're really bad at assessing the value of our own mental well-being.

>As evidenced by the proliferation of overlay ads in their smart TVs

Genuine question, is it even an option to pay $X more and get an otherwise identical TV with no overlay ads? It's admittedly been 7 or 8 years since I last purchased a TV, but I don't remember such an option being available at the time, and the only time I can ever remember seeing that sort of choice being available was with the kindle, where it's very explicit that the ad-free (but otherwise identical) version is like $20 more (or, was when I bought my kindle, which again was many years ago).

That being said, I'd be extremely curious to see sales numbers for ad-free vs ad-laden kindles, although I sort of doubt I'll ever have the chance to.

Economies of scale and some sort of insufficient-competition market failure seem to sometimes make relatively-niche choices far more expensive than they "should" be, and TVs seem to be one of those cases—so you end up with manufacturers making $100 extra dollars (numbers made up, but bear with me) per panel on ads, but it'd cost you $1,000 to get the same panel without ads, which distorts apparent consumer preferences (pushing that niche even farther out of the mainstream, and so making the gap even worse).

It's not that they care a ton about price (they do, but), but that price is verifiable, certain, and stable,, while future benefits are not, or might be rugpulled.

I have lots of problems w/crypto, but one thing they've gotten right is the credibility of self-binding. Without that, it's just hard to trust any actor on their future behavior---from Reagan's immigration amnesty, to cable tv's ads, to funding government agencies that ("this time") will fix a problem.

(None of this is motivated by any dislike for USPS, which I generally like. I'm just talking about people's (imo justified) reluctance to trade the known for the unknown).

That cost isn't saved, it's just shifted somewhere else, as demonstrated for example by the daily emptying of trash that op described.

USPS is operationally profitable for a long time. They have this requirement to save large amounts for future pension obligations that keeps them in red.

Also, Congress retains the ability to use USPS profits at will for their own projects, versus a true corporate model where profits would be reinvested back into the "business".

I’d pay $0.10 for stamps vs the 5c now (is it 5 now? I have no idea)

They're around 60 cents right now.

USPS first class "Forever" stamps currently cost $0.58.

This is why we don’t have such a receptacle by the mailboxes. It goes in everyone’s home recycling and is dealt with by the ordinary recycling pick-up.

This is one of my environmental bug-bears. How much non-recyclable, glossy paper is wasted on marketing bumf that gets distributed across a whole country only to land directly into the trash, possibly landfill? Even if it was recyclable, it's still serves no functional purpose except to be disposed of.

In the UK politicians also send out these kinds of flyers in bulk (never mind the inundation of flyers for takeaway food, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, etc.)

For any single piece of legitimate mail (which is vanishingly small as most stuff is paperless now), there are perhaps 20 or 30 pieces of junk that come with it over the course of a few weeks.

I honestly wish it got legislated against. Junk mailers aren't entitled to offload their waste through my letterbox. I don't understand why they have the right to shove advertisements into my own home.

in my area, they [junkmailers] actually interfere with delivery of mail, as a postie is not allowed to put anything in a mailbox that cant be closed [for privacy/security] so when the junk carrier shoves it full, your real mail cant be delivered.

[adndm] no posties cant [as in not allowed] remove anything, even if they just put it in there and realized its the wrong address

In the US, no one except actual USPS mail carriers are allowed to deliver anything into a mailbox. Everyone except the tiniest operations take that pretty seriously, since the US postal inspectors (mail cops) are extremely serious.

Agreed. At a bare minimum, I'd love a way to bulk unsubscribe from mailers like this. It's a waste of my time, a waste of money, and bad for the environment.

> email

Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider).

The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.

Even with siloing and owning your own domain...

It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.

Fastmail allows you to crate unlimited email aliases that forward to your main domain.

I'm a happy customer.

Fastmail is amazing. I like it so much I started paying for the three years in advance plan.

There are also free services that do this, like ImprovMX.

I used to use separate emails for orders, newsletters, etc. But what I found was that the separate email effectively became a dev/null. Gmail does a good enough job of filtering and tagging that I get a mostly clean primary inbox without effectively trashing everything else that I might want to look at once in a while, e.g. reservation confirmations.

Or just raise the price on communications, or let recipients set a price on being contacted. Charge $1/text, which the sender gets back if the recipient replies. This would very quickly make most spam uneconomical, since the expected returns wouldn't exceed the cost to send the messages.

Spam works because most of these mass communication channels are free or extremely cheap. Raise the price and economics will dictate that most of these communications will drop off.

The only non-work communication channel I use that has a better than 50% SNR is WhatsApp. And that's been getting worse lately—I think I've had about ten spam messages on that in years and years of use, and all but one's been in the last ~3 weeks.

Mail? Probably 90+% ads. Email? Hahaha, I only even bother to check it anymore when I know a messages is coming in, and that's usually from a machine. Phone? Ignore-if-not-in-contacts, probably 2x as many spam calls as real calls in a week. Text might be close to 50% but only because transactional texts (lazy 2FA implementations and prescription pick-up reminders, mostly) count as signal.

WhatsApp spam has been getting a lot worse in the past few months. I keep getting messages from foreign phone numbers using stock profile photos of attractive young women. I report them but they just come back with a different number.

Ugh, I wish.

OPSEC-wise I have a dedicated account for a certain kind of account. But what does the institution that uses that email address do? Send me 10X the email load with upsell nonsense, despite having opted out of all marketing emails.

No. Just, no. Stop. I am sick of this noise, and manually taking time to opt-out raises my switching cost. "Drowning" is a fantastic way to describe this.

Or "what is your name"? Seems like spam is always trying to hide the actual identity of the sender. "This is Jack from the warranty department"? Yeah, sure you are. Whose warranty department? They won't get specific because they know that if they do, I'll know that I don't know these people. They're trying to pretend that they're someone that I already have a relationship with, but in doing so they get vague.

And, "The vehicle warranty is about to expire"? Yeah, which vehicle? They won't get specific because they don't know.

I don't know how to implement it, but a "who are you specifically?" filter would eliminate a lot of my phone spam.

In France people put a sticker on the mailbox which says "Pas de publicité, merci" (No advertisement, thanks). It really decreased the number of ads I have received (although I still receive one from time to time). Maybe you could try something similar.

Maybe it’s time for a firewall for the phone/text systems?

If I understand correctly, SHAKEN/STIR is supposed to be this.

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