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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: in the US, the Supreme Court ruled that postal workers cannot filter out mail by the owner’s request.

It makes a bit of sense, since the mailer had already paid, but the main justification (iirc; it was years ago that I read the opinion) was that a postal service should be neutral and trusted to deliver.

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Sure, the ISP _should_ deliver the packets. No worries.

The user agent should... be an agent for the user, and be able to perform actions on their behalf.

(The legality of those actions is of course assumed by the user here... if I add an automated flamethrower to my mailbox and burn my bills, well the debt collectors may come regardless if I read them or not - we cannot shift blame to the USPS here).

Not terribly persuasive because the first argument could just as well be seen as the postal service selling a service it can't deliver.

The second argument has the problem that for the whole thing to work the recipient must also have reason to trust the post office, but here their interests are not considered at all.

Fair enough. Most advertising isn't individually posted to each address because that's expensive - they hire their own guy, who isn't a postal worker, to go around and put it in everyone's mailbox. It's like paying one cent per email to prove it isn't spam.

At least in the states, the postman is almost assuredly doing the end delivery of the mail, and is often given a stack of advert materials to mix into the delivery for a certain delivery area. The use of a mailbox by anyone who isn't a USPS employee delivering paid mail is prohibited by law. https://about.usps.com/news/state-releases/tx/2010/tx_2010_0...

No, 99.9% of the mail I get is trash and is delivered by USPS. You can't even recycle most of it because of the paper they are printed on. It's a huge, disgusting waste of resources on multiple levels.

> It's a huge, disgusting waste of resources on multiple levels.

The companies on the ads wouldn't do it that way if they were not getting a positive ROI from it. They probably only need to get 2 maybe 3 new customers to offset the cost of mass mailings.

This isn't true. Proctor and Gamble cancelled $200m of advertising and saw no change in sales. And companies using AI are costing more money to produce worse quality stuff more slowly. Facts don't matter, only how well you can convince a CEO.

Most of my physical junk mail is from local businesses like Eye Doctors, Dentists, or Trades, not National Brands unless its a local franchisee.

I don't care if the are local or national. I don't want it, I'm not interested. Most of what I get is not local, it's credit card offers. There's also the fake missed package notices that are actually home warranty companies trying trick you into calling them.

I don't care. Its still garbage I didn't ask for that is now in my mailbox so I have to deal with it. They have plenty of other ways to advertise. Everywhere I turn in public there's more ads.

In the US it's illegal for someone who's not a postal worker to put things in your mailbox for exactly this kind of reason.

So you can't hand-deliver your letters and postcards? That's sad.

Imagine a similar sticker saying 'service of papers is not permitted at this address'.

Should USPS be required to respect that owners wishes here?

Sensible decision I think.

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