a bit of lovely news about spam in California

Sat Jan 5 10:49:32 PST 2002

"Michael J. Miller Jr." wrote:

> The real world equiv. of SPAM is of course junk mail.  The fundamental
> difference of course is that the post office gets payed to deliver it and
> makes a tidy profit, thus they don't mind.  While on the email side of
> things the majority of the cost is on the delivery end and nobody gets
> compensated.  ...

I recently became aware of an annoying "feature" of USMail delivery,
namely that one cannot opt out of the neighborhood flyers, catalogs,
grocery ads, etc that come in the mailbox almost daily.  They are 
addressed to "resident" at one's address, and the companies that put 
them together contract directly with the post office for delivery.

I pursued the query up to my local Postmaster (Sunnyvale, main branch)
and was told that there is no mechanism whereby one can choose not to
receive this material.  It is too much work for the mail delivery
workers to keep lists of who is and isn't getting it, and there is no
accounting mechanism to reflect that some customers might opt out.

Given that the US Postal Service is busily working on a plan to 
allow email delivery to US residential addresses, this is a very
disturbing precedent.  Since physical-world arrangements tend to
be translated into online arrangements as part of setting up new
kinds of service, I find it very plausible that we could end up
with "official" post office spam in our emailboxes down the road.

This is a windmill I have yet to try tilting at, though it's been
on my to-do list for a while.  I'll be happy to brief any volunteers
on the approach I was going to take, if anyone is foolish^H^H^H^H 
brave enough to step forward.  ;-)

cheers,
Strata

-- 
========================================================================
Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ]                      strata "@" virtual.net
VirtualNet Consulting                            http://www.virtual.net/
 ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration **
=========================================================================