Where I live in Europe, businesses are still pretty conservative about preferring physical mail over digital alternatives. There’s no way to get our electric bill online, for example. So a curbside postbox is a must.
But they also have a very sensible program where you put a sticker on your postbox that features a little stop sign icon and the phrase “no advertising please!” (appropriately translated). The post delivery guy then does not give you any of the mass-mailed circulars. No registration or additional fee needed.
However, there’s no rule against private distribution of material to postboxes, so we get restaurant menus, charity pamphlets, “we want to resell your car/house” flyers, etc. Of course these rules are not really enforced in the US either, but here the rule doesn’t even exist.
Still, the “no ads!” sticker makes a huge difference, and I commend all jurisdictions to entertain it as an option.
(Another upside of the conservative preference for mailing printed invoices is that businesses regularly don’t expect upfront or immediate payment for in-home services. We’ll have a team of window washers or whatever, they’ll finish up, we’ll ask them if they take a card, and they say nah, we’ll mail you the statement, and leave. Even after many years of being here, this kind of old-fashioned trust still feels novel.)
If you mean putting an item in your mailbox without paying postage, that’s very much enforced in the US. We get our church flyers and “can I buy your house?” cards tucked behind the mailbox or in the gate some feet away. That’s why rural mailboxes have a newspaper tube with them.
I should have said “not consistently enforced.” Where I lived in the PNW, we tried to get the local post office interested, and it wasn’t a priority for them. But I’ve heard that’s not the case everywhere.
It’s a Federal offense and, in my experience, is pretty rigorously enforced. Every election season I hear volunteers doing lit drops being emphatically told not to put campaign lit inside anyone’s mailbox.
I get a physical check for dividends and interest from a bank every month. No, it can’t be done electronically and I don’t have control of that account.
So I get 12 useful pieces of mail a year at the very least.
Junk mail is a cost of doing business for you, the receiver of meaningful mail. The money paid by those junk mailers helps subsidize the postage for the things you do want to get, so that 1st class mail doesn’t cost the sender as much as it costs USPS to deliver it in a relatively timely manner. The cost of junk mail to you, the receiver, is the effort of throwing it into the recycle bin.
A very odd restriction for us outside the US. Everything goes in my mailbox - mail, newspapers, fliers, all the recent provincial election bumpf, whether delivered by Canada Post or not. About the only thing that doesn’t are packages too large to fit.
