I have no desire to get revenge. I really don’t give a shit about who mails what. I only used the word “revenge” because I know that’s what the people who get excited over sending bricks have in mind.
I was marking a bunch of stuff “Refused – Do not send this material” and throwing it back in mailboxes. It was general junk mail. Then one time I had to go to the post office for something and handed some of this to the clerk. He told me that almost all of it was sent at a rate that would result in it being discarded, not returned to sender, so I had been wasting my time.
My BIL is an assistant postmaster. He says that business reply envelopes are coded for a maximum postage rate, generally it’s one ounce first class mail. Anything over one ounce is rejected. If there is a return address it is sent back. If not it is tossed. Boxes with BR envelopes attached are routed through the parcel area and would be rejected. Some BR items are rated for parcel post and would pass even if there is a brick in a box. He said his post office rejected a couple hundred BR items every day. Most ends up in the recycling bin.
I did that once. Apparently, they took it as a “yes, I would like to subscribe to your crappy magazine,” because I started getting it shortly thereafter. So, you may want to redact any identifying information if you do this.
In his book Prank the Monkey, John Hargrave, the founder of comedy site ZUG, talks about striking back at junk mail senders by mailing back heavy stuff. Apparently, anything you can fit in the original envelope is fair game, even if you have to strap-tape the envelope back together. He started with a steel chain, moved up to a folded piece of lead roof flashing, and finally mailed a bar of solid lead that weighed almost 6 pounds. In each case, he did something so that he’d know the envelope was received, like send it back with a completed credit card application or a check with a small donation to his college’s scholarship fund. The letters were always received, and apparently paid for by the recipient.
And everyone esle, even those who work at the USPS (I know a couple of Postal Inspectors myself) have said just the opposite. Perhaps, a book about successful pranks by the prankster himself is not an unbiased source?
The only time I’ve done a “punishment mailing.” was a couple decades ago before people knew what to make of libertarians. I got on the same day a letter “signed” by Ted Kennedy saying I could now tell the NRA to go to hell, and a letter “signed” by Charleton Heston saying I should join the NRA to stop the “gun grabbers.” I sent back the BRM envelopes with the others’ literature in it.
If it fits in the original envelope, the USPS staff may have failed to weigh the item.
Most BRM envelopes don’t need weighed.
Speaking as an online retailer that sends a substantial amount of product by mail,
I’ve accidentally discovered that a substantial percentage of items where the printed weight on the parcel is wrong do in fact make it through the system unchecked.
I’ve never willfully cheated the USPS, but out of the tens of thousands of items I’ve sent over the years, I did make a few weight mistakes and most of them did get through.
USPS employees are human like anyone else.
Sure, that happens, but in that case the mass mailer has not been penalized, since he was only billed for normal return mail. So, the “prank” had a net result of 0.