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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

I hate USPS, and will not be doing anything to benefit them until they offer a way to limit my deliveries to once a month, and opt out of anything that has "or current resident"

At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.

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In Canada, you can place a red dot (or write no unsolicited mail) on your mailbox and they will withhold delivering anything not directly addressed to you.

I was shocked when I moved to SF and found out there was no way to opt out of unaddressed mail (or "current resident").

In Finland AFAICT there's no bulk postal rate. Instead, paper spam is delivered thru mail slots by private services that hit all the buildings in the neighborhood and drop collections of paper spam. So, many people post a note on their door opting out from this stuff. (Ei mainoksia = No ads.) It must be saving absolutely huge amounts of paper.

Fun fact: in the U.S. it’s illegal to put anything but mail (delivered by USPS) in a mailbox or mail slot. USPS wants a monopoly on that paper spam.

But when you have to push a rotten fish thru someone's mail slot, the law be damned.

Unfortunately bulk mail is the only thing paying the bills. That and being a last mile delivery service for Amazon.

Which is a totally valid reason to hate USPS.

The USPS is a government-run spam delivery service that there is no way to opt out of. Those of us who do banking and other administrative tasks online would be better off if the government shut it down completely, or better yet subsidized it slightly so it doesn't have to deliver spam to survive.

But as it is, I don't see any good reason to have any more respect for USPS than I do for any other spammer.

Yes, exactly. I wish the post office were subsidized and acted in the interests of the public. But it is not, and does not.

Doesn't seem like USPS is the spammer. They're Gmail. People send spam and USPS/Gmail delivers it.

No, it’s completely different. Gmail actively tries to prevent spam. If they catch you sending it, you will be banned, and they let individual users block whoever they want. A huge part of their product is automated spam filtering.

On the other hand, spam delivery is the business model of USPS. They actively and intentionally market and sell their services to spammers, and not surprisingly, give normal users no way to opt out.

There are mail forwarding services[0] that let you automatically filter out junk mail. Yes, they cost money, but at least you can accomplish your goal of opting out (or in) from receiving postal mail from certain senders.

  [0] E.g. https://www.usglobalmail.com/virtual-mailbox/

You will still get mail to your address though...

If your goal is to receive zero mail at your address, simply have all your email forwarded to this service and configure it to opt-out of all notifications.

Alternately, you can forward your mail to an entirely different address. (This is just a Gedankenexperiment; please don't spam strangers by forwarding your mail to them.)

A lot of mail is marked as do not forward

And junk/bulk rate mail is never forwarded.

Such mail is returned to the sender, which means you will never receive it, so problem solved.

It will still land in your mailbox at home, how would you never receive it?

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