Physical-Mail Spam

Thanks to software like SpamAssassin, my email inbox only gets around 5-8 spam emails a day and about 99.9999% of that gets caught by Mail’s junk filter.

Unfortunately the USPS has not caught on to using any kind of “junk” filter for their service.

How is it that in the short time the internet has been around, there are already solid solutions for almost completely eliminating junk while the USPS, which has been around for over 200 years, offers no real solution for keeping my mailbox free of crap?

Over 90% of the mail that is in our physical mailbox is pure junk. Unsolicited, useless junk. Sure there are ways to opt-out of some of the things like credit card offers, but the real problem is the “local” unsolicited mail. Things like postcards advertising the new gym down the street or a brochure from the shop nearby that is having a big sale.

All these business have to do is include the line “Current Resident” in the address line and it will always get delivered to your mailbox. The USPS’s policy to allow this crap through the system without offering a way to opt-out is just as criminal as the spammers who send millions of spam email every day.

So, USPS, if the piece of mail doesn’t have my name on it, or even worse just has “Current Resident” as the recipient, don’t deliver it to my mailbox. I don’t want it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 8:43 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Nov 8 2007

3 Responses to “Physical-Mail Spam”

Fill out Form 1500 on any of the retail spam you get. Form 1500 is a form the USPS created after the Supreme Court ruled that anyone can get pornographic mail stopped from being sent to their address. “But I’m getting Chinese restaurant junk, not porn!” you cry. But a key part of the ruling is that the USPS canNOT decide what is porn and what is not. So fill out Form 1500, declare that you think the junk mail is porn, and poof! no more stuff from that company for 5 years. This is non-appealable by the company. And if they do mail you again, they get fined significantly ($1,500 I think) after you file a complaint about it. It works for me.

You cannot stop political junk mail, or commercial junk mail that doesn’t want you to buy something. Form 1500 only works for junk mail trying to separate you from your money.

Michael Clark on November 8th, 2007 at 8:55 am

What settings are you using for SpamAssasin because I us it and I still junk 99.9% sounds pretty darn good to me?

Do you see any legit emails being blocked or caught?

Gadizmo on December 30th, 2007 at 9:30 pm

@Gadizmo: I usually set it to mark spam at 5 and then auto-delete at 6 or 7. There have been one or two times legit email got caught but otherwise it’s been fantastic.

Josh Pigford on January 25th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

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