a bit of lovely news about spam in California

Wed Jan 9 16:25:15 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.

It'd be nice to see a plan which clarifies that -nobody- "resides" at
a PO Box itself, nor "occupies" it -- I imagine little dollhouse furniture
carefully arranged to dodge the letter path, urgh -- so mail to "resident"
and "occupant" should not be accepted at PO Boxes proper.

But it would have to be legislated, so I don't see it happening soon.

> 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.

I think my description, while not nailing -all- snail-spam, would clobber
a fair chunk of it.

> 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.

We still get the home court advantage, when we can use milters and the 
like to turn it away at the SMTP gate.  The analogy would be like just
happening to open your box at the moment your friendly post-office man
is about to slip mail in.  "No occupant or resident mail please" "okay"
he says.  If you're lucky.

> 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

I do know of some companies offering PMB arrangements where they accept
all mail, and if you pay extra + provide a waiver, they'll follow your
instructions for snail-mail-filtering.  Obviously the fee+waiver is a 
CYA against the feds claiming they are messing with mail... you're
designating them your recipient, then enforcing a contract about what
mail -should- be passed along to you.

-* Heather Stern * Arch (secretary) BayLISA Board * http://www.baylisa.org/ *-