From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Laura Creighton Message-Id: <200402290935.i1T9ZsbV013642@ratthing-b246.strakt.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: [9fans] re: spam Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 10:35:54 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 04591878-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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