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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

" senior leadership of USPS made it clear that they would never participate in any project that would limit junk mail and that they were immediately shutting down our partnership."

This part is really interesting. Why would USPS do that ? Can someone from outbox elaborate on this ? I would love to get rid of the junk mail that I receive on a daily basis in my mailbox. It is crazy and I have to waste time in taking it out of my mailbox, sorting through them to ensure they indeed are junk and then throwing them into my recycle bin. Not to mention that the recyle bin then needs to be placed bi-weekly outside to be picked up. It is time we had a donotcall.gov equivalent for junk mails.

Sad to see these guys go. The business model sounds like something I would have tried as a user. Funny though that never heard of them personally. Guess need to watch more Jay Leno!!

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"Why would USPS do that ?"

About 80% of the mail in my mailbox is junkmail. Someone is paying to send that. It seems pretty obvious why the USPS wouldn't want to limit junkmail.

Spam in your e-mail that is slightly annoying but not terribly terrible outside of excess bit and bytes on the net... Senate gets involved.

Spam in your real mail box which even at a quick glace effects:

- waste management resources

- recycling resources

- extra work for USPS (sorting, shipping, delivery)

- extra weight == more gasoline required

- environmental issues (litter, printing chemicals, trees = cut down)

And that is probably just the tip of the ice-berg on actual impact... nope, not an issue, this is how we make money.

I've had a problem with this for years, but there is no way to fix it besides charging the producers of such "mail" an arm and a leg.

Maybe we should push for the death of "Mailbox Neutrality"... or wait, should we support it so they'll kill it off?...

/rant

The USPS employs 522,144 [1] voting humans who depend on junk mail for paychecks and pensions; email considerably fewer.

Edit: source [1] http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H1

"email considerably fewer."

How so? I'd say that number is actually much higher.

You think that the email spam industry collectively employs more than 500,000 full-time voting adults, rather than a relative handful of humans and tons of bots? It's fine if you do, my hunch is just different.

No, but email in general does. And...

LOADS of what people classify as "spam" is simply stuff they signed up for and forgot about. Just last night a client had someone write in saying "I'm not getting your emails!". After some back and forth they had - 2 days prior - marked it as "spam" because they didn't recognize the name of the list, and so weren't getting any more mails (or, they were getting junked).

You may be able to make an internal distinction between "the spam industry" and "email" but many people can't or don't. Or perhaps more to the point, many people classify spam as "anything I don't like or didn't ask for" (even if, by dint of entering in to a transaction, they do in fact grant permission to get necessary emails now and then).

If only they could hire another 2^11+2^6+2^3 (2144) employees and make it an even 2^19.

Something like 80 or 90% of USPS revenue comes from junk mail / mailers, companies pay them to guarantee that it shows up in your mailbox.

There are services that let you unsubscribe from junk mail (after a ruling that said that there has to be a way for consumers to unsubscribe, similar to like in email) like https://www.catalogchoice.org/

doughj3 is right, postal mail would have been in the toilet so to speak, a long time sooner if it wasn't for the massive amount of junk mail that as he puts it "subsidizes" the service.

Up here in Canada I've almost got my mail to a point where I can tell them (Canada Post) to suspend service to my home. My estimate is that I'll have about 6 pounds less paper waste to drop into the recycling bin every month.

Junkmail effectively subsidizes the USPS.

The much more expensive first class mail could be thought of as the subsidy--it allows the USPS to funnel buckets of cheap junk mail into our boxes.

Except for package delivery it's all unprofitable though, especially in rural areas.

Are you sure about that? Pre-sorted, pre-coded "junk mail" with a flexible delivery schedule is much cheaper to move through the system.

It's vastly cheaper to deliver but it also pays vastly lower prices.

Why would a company not want to limit its biggest business?

The Outbox dudes complain about government but many/most companies would not so willingly partner up to shrink its best business.

Employee unions at the USPS worried about further job losses due to technology. Can't do anything that would decrease revenue, even if it means technological progress.

Of course, that's purely rational. Get a bunch of $100K/year programmers in a room and ask them to build software that improves the workflow of working with offshored $7/hour developers, and see the response you get.

Are you sure? I think we're doing pretty well at that. oDesk and open source have done a lot for a lot of people.

This comment is garbage. Do you think the CEO of USPS wants to decrease revenue? Hell no.

Imagine you're the CEO of a business that is bleeding cash left, right, and center, and someone comes to you with a plan that will reduce your revenue 20% while reducing your costs 50%. You don't think you'd consider that plan even for a second?

I'm not saying such a plan would work for USPS, and definitely not saying Outbox could have brought that sort of value proposition to USPS, but reducing revenue is not always a poor business decision.

Does the USPS have a CEO? Or is that Congress?

Sadly, USPS sees bulk mailers as their customer; American citizens (and our kitchen tables) are their product. It's like the old line: if you aren't paying for the service, you are the product. If curious, listen to a full story of it here: http://kut.org/post/austin-startup-says-you-ll-never-touch-s...

> Sadly, USPS sees bulk mailers as their customer...

Not so sadly, doing so allows more reasonable rates for normal mail.

50 cents to send a piece of paper across the continent in just a couple of days is a bargain as far as I'm concerned. A dollar will even get your piece of paper across the world in just a few more days than that.

It's quite unbelievable that it works so well for such a cheap price.

I'm addressing my wedding invitations and skimming through Hacker News this afternoon. $25 to mail about two dozen envelopes (invite plus stamped rsvp), and half a dozen more with international addresses or additional weight that I'm taking to the post office in half an hour. And that's the bare minimum I could get away with sending paper invites to, everyone else is getting evites. Then there's a round of rehearsal dinner invites and thank you notes going out in the next couple months...

Not to mention I have two packages to return, and a bunch of my wedding accessories shipped USPS. All this week, before I consider any business-related needs (another 6-7 envelopes).

Not a terrible service at all. Could be better, fairly cheap for what it is, and I wish I could pay to not get junk mail, but...not too bad. Definitely better than Ontrac ;)

You can "opt-out" of quite a bit (most?) junk mail: https://www.dmachoice.org/

It is time we had a donotcall.gov equivalent for junk mails.

http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicit...

It is time we had a donotcall.gov equivalent for junk mails.

The UK has such a scheme: the Mailing Preference Service (http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/)

It is the mail equivalent of the Telephone Preference Service (http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/)

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