[9fans] re: spam

[Laura Creighton <lac@strakt.com>]

In Sweden, the fix for paper mail is simple.  You put a sign 'ingen
recklam, tack' (no advertising please) beside your mailbox.  Then
the post office, and other delivery people do not give you any.  Most
people do this.

But the Americans have a very odd attitude towards their physical mailbox.
When I lived there, I lived for a long while on a busy street, right at
the bus stop.  This meant that people who were waiting for the bus would
steal my morning newspaper every morning unless I got up before 0530.
In the meantime, this house was getting between 30 and 50 pieces of
mail addressed to some previous occupant -- 'or current occupant'.

I decided to see what I could do to get no spam delivered, and my
newspaper put through the slot (which was plenty large enough).  It
turned out that this was impossible, because the mailslot is considered
to be US Postal Service property (!).  Only genuine Postal Employees
had the right to put things through my slot, and my paper deliverer
was forbidden to do so.  (I think the fact that he made deliveries by
tossing papers through the open window of the passenger side of his
car had more to do with his reluctance, but he was perfectly correct
that what I wanted him to do was illegal.)  Meanwhile, there was no
force on earth that could convince the post office to stop sending
me spam. When I investigated, it seemed in San Francisco the problem
was that they had hired many, many new mail carriers to handle the
bulk mail, and they did not want to fire them when the demand dried
up.

So the only fix I could see was to pass a law that made your mail slot
your own property, combined with a provision to have mail delivery
3 times a day.

I could never interest a political representative in such a scheme,
though.  I wrote a good many of them to suggest it.  I also suspect
that the no spam service is something that people would have to pay
for, at least at first.

This is, of course, what I want in an electronic service.  Geoff thinks
of what he is writing as a butler, whereas I think of it as a Swedish
Postal worker.

Laura