Does the United States Postal Service provide a service like a spam filter to weed out circulars and other pieces of physical spam?
If they don’t, why not?
Why in the world would they? Third-class mail is a major money-maker, and third-class mailers have just as much right to have their mail delivered as anybody else.
That stuff is a big party of their business (and they are a quasi-government business) and it wouldn’t look so great if they offered people a way not to receive stuff that others are paying for people to get. Besides, spam exists in electronic form. Computers can just catch it and dump it into the ether. Blocking physical junk mail, advertising circulars, and other stuff of that type would require them to sort through mail, categorize it, and then dispose of it in some way. I suppose that they could have a do-not-send list like telemarketers have but that sends us back to the problem in the first sentence.
Logistically, it can’t be done and it would probably be a bad thing if they did.
I just sort my mail when I get it. Junk mail goes straight into the recycle bin.
Well to be fair, phone companies did exactly this. They used to derive significant income from telemarketers and offered various packages and services to aid telemarketers. At the same time, they also offered services to individuals that were advertised to block telemarketers – privacy blocking, caller-ID, etc.
From the provider’s perspective, it is not necessarily a bad idea to sell both services. If you can charge an individual more per month for the privacy service than you can expect to make from sending them a month’s worth of spam, then you are out ahead. Sure, you’ll lose some spam business as the privacy business takes off, but in a hypothetical, perfect market it should stay balanced.
Would it even be legal for the USPS to offer this service? Or would laws have to be changed? Considering the effort that the USPS goes to deliver every single piece of mail, it is probably against their very nature to filter mail.
A final hurdle would be the responibility involved in filtering someone’s mail. Would the USPS be more liable, or possibly just more frequently sued, if non-junk mail is not delievered? In the case of the privacy services that the phone companies sell, the ultimate filtering decision is up to you. If you miss a call, it is your mistake. However, if the USPS throws away your mail before it is delievered, then that could open a big can of worms.
The Mail Preference Service of the Direct Marketing Association can cut some of your junk mail, although not all.
Yes, it really does work.
No, you won’t get on mailing lists by giving them your information.
It’s free to register by mail, although they charge $5 for what they call the “Complete Online Option.” I suspect this is a sop to their members (i.e. companies that send junk mail) to keep it from being too easy and quick for people to get onto the Do Not Mail list.
If you really want to get less junk mail, this is the best way to do it.
There are ways to reduce the amount of junk mail you get, though as with email spam, I imagine many senders ignore these tools.
Possibly the most annoying junk mail we get is labelled “Important information about your mortgage!!” which I’m always terrified to ignore, and 100% of the time is from some other mortgage company wanting to refinance our mortgage. The worst of these comes from our primary mortgage company, as in really can’t ignore it, even when it’s just an attempt to get us to open a home equity loan :mad: sorry for the hijack there!
They do, in fact.
Issue a probitory order as described on the Junkbusters website.
Note that this only works against one sender at a time, it’s not a cure for all junk mail.
I have some experience with this, I had to use it to get AOL to stop sending me CDs. You may need to have a lot of perseverance. I issued a Prohibitory Order against AOL which was violated several dozen times. In all cases I duly followed the reporting rules from the USPS, which issued warnings to AOL, which ignored them.
After many months of doing this, the USPS finally escalated things up the ladder and referred the matter to the Attorney General of the United States (!) (John Ashcroft at the time) for prosecution. Some VP type at AOL then wrote a letter stating that they’d cut it out. That letter is a prized possession.
I like to think that at the time, Ashcroft’s “To Do” list had:
#1 - Stop terrorists from attacking the US.
#2 - Make AOL stop sending Valgard those CDs.
Anyhow it worked but it wasn’t quick.
#3 - Profit!
Am I the only one who laughed at this description of junk mail? 
Maybe, but I immediately thought of the guy who went through the wood chipper. I am so going to hell.
Do you really want the U.S. Postal Service, which is established by law as a government-regulated monopoly, to have the power to decide which mail from which senders you will or will not have delivered to you.
Think about it. It’s fine and dandy to have the local post office toss out that letter about refinancing your student loans, but when they toss out your subscription renewal for Tinfoil Hat Conspirators Monthly there’d be hell to pay!
Or having an overly-religious mailperson decide that your bi-quarterly issue of Whips & Garters is inappropriate material? Or a UCLA Alumni trash your copy of Trojan Weekly?
I can see the bumper sticker now.
You can have my Whips & Garters when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers!
I usually call it snail-spam.
They are being consistent!
USPS sends one or more snailmail postcards a month.
Hmmmm. Is there an exemption for the USPS itself?
I would get a huge kick from barring the USPS from sending me any mail that it originated.
I just tried this tactic when my neighborhood post office opened a few hours ago. The item in question was a flyer from an online computer/electronics retailer advertising their seasonal sales and promotions. The postmaster refused to accept the form for that particular mailing, claiming that there’s nothing remotely erotic or arousing about computer equipment. Even when I asked incredulously how he had never heard the word “sexy” applied to Apple computers (which were among the advertised items in the flyer), he dismissed my request and suggested I write directly to the CEO of the company asking to be taken off their mailing list.
Now that I’ve followed Balthisar’s link more carefully, I see that the Supreme Court ruling which extends prohibitory orders to any mailer, not just ones sending sexually explicit content, is available on an easily printed page that I can take back to the post office this afternoon. Unfortunately, as the postmaster quite rightly pointed out, the address I want to guard is a mailbox on a university campus, which is not serviced by the USPS but by a private delivery company. Who knows whether they’re governed by the same laws that allow me to protect my home mailbox from intrusive advertising?
As a postal worker, I can tell you that in the mid-90s, the Nigerian scammers were alive and well pre-internet. We were getting (literally) tons of mail from Nigeria, the placenames of which had obviously been harvested from the Sydney telephone directory (eg. “Dulwich Hill” became “Dlwch Hll”, etc).
There was nothing we could do about it until we discovered that we were not getting payment from the Nigerian postal administration, and that the stamps were forgeries. From that point onwards, the entire lot was incinerated.
We can also refuse to carry articles deemed offensive (unwrapped porn, for example).
Basically though, if it’s posted correctly, we have no right to interfere with it, spam or no.