Ken and I were on the same page yesterday. I was just thinking about this, and in my case, the numbers are even worse. I'm actually in fear of opening one of my email accounts because there is so much junk in it.
I get a lot of junk mail. Almost 140 pieces last month alone. I thought spam was supposed to get rid of junk mail. Instead, I also get about 350 pieces of e-mail spam a month in addition to the junk mail I get in my physical box. Most of the spam gets caught in various filters or traps, but I still have to clean those filters out. I wish my mailbox had a filter. Or better yet, a shredder.
As an experiment, I decided to save a whole month’s worth of mail. All of it. I wanted to see just how much junk mail I was really getting. For purposes of this study, I decided that anything that was not a legitimate bill, an authorized magazine subscription, or personal correspondance would be categorized as junk mail- even if it came from an entity I had previously or was currently engaged in some form of commerce with, so long as this new correspondance was of another nature. Basically, if it was an offer, plea, advertisement, special offer or anything except those listed above, it was junk mail.
The pile in the picture is the resulting junk mail pile, minus the tri-weekly newspaper-like fliers with grocery ads and miscellaneous great deals. Between my wife and me, we received 13 credit card offers, 11 refinance deals, 7 promises of cheaper indurance, 7 survey questionaires, 43 different advertisements, including 5 from Cingular- the company we already use for cell phone service, 28 pleas from charitable organizations, 10 political fundraising pleas and one unordered magazine. My daughter even got some junk mail, an advertisement for a kids magazine. She’s eight.
If I could take a picture of my e-mail spam it would be at least twice as tall and you’d probably see a similar breakdown of categories- a bunch of refinance offers, insurance promises, political and charitable pleas and surveys, and of course, the ever present penis enlargement miracle cures. (At least I don’t have to touch those ones with my real hands!)
During that same month, I received a grand total of 29 legitimate pieces of mail. Just over one piece per day. Yet every day my hands were full coming back from the mailbox.
So what’s my point? There are any number of social or political parallels I could apply to my junk mail story. I could equate the overbearing amount of junk mail to the incessant stream of bullshit coming out of Washington D.C. and especially the White House. Or I could analyze the enormous amount of wasted resources that are consumed creating, delivering, and disposing of all this junk mail. Or I could complain that like pets, society has become to resemble its junk mail, all flash and little substance.
All of those descriptions are true. But they still don’t change the basic fact that a lot of people are wasting a lot of time sending everybody else a lot of junk. We’re getting buried in it. And we’re going to soon have another mental disorder to deal with- Junk Mail Fatigue. With so many real problems mankind could be working on, we’re perfecting the art of mass mailing things no one will ever look at.
What bothers me most I guess is the sheer waste of it all. The unnecessarily wasted paper, ink, fuel that are used up in the whole process. At every step along the way, energy is consumed, resources are used up, people are worn out, and for what? So that I and my neighbors and friends can take a handful of paper and toss it in the recycle bin or worse, the regular trash? Why do I need 5 different advertisements from my own cell phone company during the month, and then the same adverts in my monthly bill? Would my rates be lower if they stopped wasting so much money advertising to their own customers? Why does the charity that I donate to about four times a year send me pleas 8 times a year, each time stuffed with more address labels than I can ever use? And why do charities that I’ve never donated to send me free writing tablets, calendars, and nickels? They are asking me for money and they’re sending me nickels? Hello? Anybody home? And if I didn’t sign up for your credit card after 7 years of special offers, what makes you think I’ll do it now?
For the sake of our environment, national security, and energy conservation it is time to rein in the out of control junk mail industry, if for no other reason than to preserve our postal sanity. I know it’s not as important as ending the war in Iraq, or getting health care for all Americans, but for all the reasons listed, it’s got to be a close third. And if it’s not, well, it damn well should be.
Ken is 100% correct, this is a security and environmental matter. It's time we started taking the threat of junk mail seriously. If I were a politician, I'd take up this issue, because no one in America except a small number of fundraisers and corporate types would object, and there is little that is more universally hated than junk mail.
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Not as widespread, but even more pernicious...
... are junk faxes. For those of us who keep a fax machine hooked up, some asshole companies robodial and keep track of the fax #s they find. Then they (or whoever they sell your number to) send you all kinds of pointless marketing faxes for crap/services you'd never want/trust if your life depended on it. Who the fuck are these people to use my paper and ink and to decide that I want to waste the earth's resources in this way?
The alternative is that I have to keep my fax machine disconnected except when I know I have an incoming fax, which is a pain if I'm not near the fax machine when one is coming.
Relative to Kathy Sierra's plight, it's on the low-end of the harassment scale, but it is another scumbag encroachment into one's personal space. These fuckers should be forced to eat and drink all of the paper and ink they're wasting.
www.vastleft.com
Know what’s great? These.
Know what's great? These. At your sole discretion you can designate any mailpiece purient and subject the sender to fines for not leaving you alone. The post office will fight you tooth and nail (I've gotten correspondence from the Counsel's office in DC, trying to get me to stop, but it's THE LAW, affirmed in a supreme court decision.) The more people use this, the more effective it is. Have a blast.
Speaking of Junk Mail..
Has anybody noticed the increase in junk mail disguised as official correspondence? Mortgage companies are notorious for doing this. I don't know how many times I've received something disguised as a letter from my real mortgage company, only to open it up and find yet another offer to refi (I'll be glad when most of these lowlife companies go belly up, real soon). I've received offers of life insurance in letters made to look VERY similar to letters from the Social Security Administration; car offers sent in letters made to look like they were sent fedex; bogus "checks" from credit card and finance companies, you name it. This shit should be illegal. Senior citizens, or even very gullible younger people could very easily fall victim to a scam. Not to mention, in a fit of junk mail fatigue, you could end up throwing away something that IS important. I hate bogus junk mail more than I hate spam (you can always ignore spam)
Junk Mail
Like the Worm Ouroboros, the only reason we can still send a letter for less then ~$10 is all the presorted junk mail. How does one stop it w/o destroying the post office? (I used to date a letter carrier...)
darms, i'll happily pay more
to send mail, a lot more, if it means we're not destroying a squaremile of the rainforest and creating heaping piles in garbage dumps.
in a sane gov't, the post office budget would be like the military budget is now- no one questions the need for as much as they need to run efficiently. let's get rid of the V-22 flying death trap that the military didn't even want, and spend that on paying carriers more and keeping postage rates down.
Oh AC, that's a howler indeed
For those who dislike to open PDF files, our (in this case) sadly misnamed Anonymous Coward above provides a link to a form telling the USPS that you find the material in this particular mailing to be "erotically arousing or sexually provocative" and that you are requesting a Prohibitive Order against that particular mailer.
Now does anybody see in those words any definition of "erotically arousing or sexually provocative"? I do not. Nor has one ever been issued by any court of which I am aware, beyond the famous Supreme Court justice [forget name right now] who said "I know it when I see it."
It's a big, wide, wonderful world we live in after all, and an elementary study of the subject suggests that there is no possible limit to the type, variety and number of items, persons or situations which somebody, somewhere is going to find "erotically arousing or sexually provocative".
Mattress advertising is an obvious no-brainer. Cars have been a setting of sin for how many of us? Mortgages after all are for houses and those we all know to be the scenes of the vast majority of wickedness. Grocery ads...I should turn this over to Lambert for a discussion of the uses and implications of zucchini but suffice to say the possibilities are endless.
Get this form. Use it often. Just by all means do not check the box below which is a general demand to not be mailed ANY sort of "sexually oriented advertisements." We're only trying to get rid of junk here after all, not the good stuff. :)
Need an Opt Out Law
Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent "Do not mail" is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing - and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today's [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today's merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer's right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel