a bit of lovely news about spam in California

Mon Jan 7 18:02:59 PST 2002

It gets better.  I used to have a (fairly small) postal box.
I needed a permanent address at the time as was traveling quite
a bit.  There were times when it got checked every 3-4 (or 6)
weeks.  It would be STUFFED with supermarket flyers and the
like.  And perhaps 6 letters/bills/important stuff.

Then I got a note from them demanding that I buy a larger box
because it was always full.

My first action was to save 3 months of junk, and envelopes
from 3 months of useful mail; point out that the useful stuff,
that had a NAME on it (not resident) fit in my hand and jacket
pocket.  The flyers needed a box.  I went into the postmaster's
office to get them to stop sending the crap.  They wouldn't
let me out of junk mail.  So my juvenile retaliation was to
turn over the box and leave (it was a good box and I had never
wanted it).

My more measured action was to toss stacks of the flyers (the
trash was full of them) into the office of the supermarket
manager.  Frankly, the technique was more useful when my
whole neighborhood did that with menu's to a nearby chinese
restaurant in NYC.

Quoting Derek J. Balling (dredd at megacity.org):
> At 3:40 PM -0800 1/7/02, Strata Rose Chalup wrote:
> >Sorry, I think this kind of attitude just adds to the problem.
> >Traffic is traffic.  Saying one kind of traffic is "spam" and
> >therefore bad, and the other is "autoLART" and therefore good
> >and/or justified is just moral window dressing on having spam
> >cost 2*X bandwidth instead of just X bandwidth to the net
> >community.
> 
> Wait... they (the USPS) gets paid by the sender to send me stuff. 
> They don't cut me in for a percentage of the cash. They INSIST that I 
> accept it, don't give me any way of avoiding having my mailbox 
> cluttered with stuff. They (both the USPS and the sender) force ME, 
> the recipient, to pay for its disposal cost (or risk the littering 
> fine if I just drop it on the ground by my mailbox), and you think 
> that sending it back to them as "unwanted" is somehow out of line?!
> 
> Any way that you cut it, if I accept the junk-mail, I have to incur 
> the cost of disposal. The only way for the recipient NOT to accept 
> the disposal cost is to hand it back to the USPS for disposal. But 
> since they won't "dispose" of junk mail for you, you have to tell 
> them to send it back where it came from.
> 
> D
> 
> 
> -- 
> +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+
> | dredd at megacity.org  | "Thou art the ruins of the noblest man  |
> |  Derek J. Balling   |  That ever lived in the tide of times.  |
> |                     |  Woe to the hand that shed this costly  |
> |                     |  blood" - Julius Caesar Act 3, Scene 1  |
> +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+