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Trade in your Junk Mail for Spam 183

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lot-easier-to-filter-the-virtual-paper dept.
QueueEhGuy writes "CNN is reporting that the Swedish Postal Service, Posten, is now offering a service where customers can choose to receive spam via a free, government run, service. Business are given the option of using this at a 25% discount from carrier delivered mail. For those of us with physical addresses, it raises an interesting question as to which one is less annoying, environmental benefits aside." Interesting step towards charging postage for email.
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Trade in your Junk Mail for Spam More

Trade in your Junk Mail for Spam

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  • bet this will be a popular service

    • Actually, it could! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pong ( 18266 )
      I have never received a single spam e-mail for a legitimate product - not one - it's all about herbs, life-insurance, penis enlargement, crap like that. On the other hand the paper junk mail I get are from the local stores and are full of relevant offers.

      I bet the difference is that the cost of paper junk mail is high enough, that you cannot market pure junk and earn enough on the fools.
      • "I have never received a single spam e-mail for a legitimate product - not one - it's all about herbs, life-insurance, penis enlargement, crap like that. On the other hand the paper junk mail I get are from the local stores and are full of relevant offers."

        I have received exactly 2 spams in my life that I truly believe were for a legitimate product. (They were the same spam but sent at different times.) The product was barbecue hot sauce - the web site was www.productname.com and had legitimate mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc but I did not phone long distance to see if they were for real. Still I sicked spamcop.net on it.

  • Correct link to Posten (and yes, in English) (Score:4, Informative)

    by Troed ( 102527 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:15PM (#3815410) Homepage Journal
    Posten [posten.se]
    • Rather witty.

      Apparently it seems to be a service for official documents and pay information to get sent via a web interface as well as physically.

      Kind of cool, although I imagine it's only open to registered senders for security reasons.
      • I got some brochures/ads about this new service a couple of weeks ago. It seems to be a pretty cool service, that will reduce the amount of boring (paper) mail, by sending them electronically instead. Why not, I guess this will save some (a lot) of trees when it works properly. Another nice aspect is that I will finally have all my bills and other important papers organized and easy to find. I guess regular backups are recommended, though.

        The only problem I can see with this service is the very small number of (registered) senders that is available at this moment. Hopefully that will change in some time though.
    • I am posting this without any bonuses because I freely acknowledge that it is wildly off-topic.

      Nevertheless, it is no more so, and no more inappropriate, than the signature above. A look at Troed's journal [slashdot.org] provides no means to publicly respond to him, as the discussions are archived. He has not even provided an email address. I regard these circumstances as calling into serious question his contention that he is interested in the free exchange of ideas. Rather, it seems he is attempting to sneak his message in whenever he can, no matter how irrelevant it may be.

      I do not question Troed's right to post anything he wants in his sig. I do question his discretion. This topic has nothing to do with the Middle East, so his objective is simply to goad. I need not list the places around the web available for informed and lively debate about the Middle East. /. is not one of them. Moreover, the rather underhanded means of calling attention to his view puts other users in an uncomfortable position. Should moderaters mod Troed down? The sig is certainly off topic, even if the post is not. Should those who disagree with him post responses, even though they contribute nothing to the discussion at hand, and set themselves up to be modded down for being offtopic?

      The tactic is clever, I'll give it that. I do care, Troed, and my eyes are open, not only to Palestinian terror [cnn.com], but also to your bullying. I urge you to reconsider your sig, and take the discussion to your journal. Otherwise, though it is not an ideal solution, I may add myself to those who mod your down on sight.

      Please don't compound your inconsideration, or mine, by carrying this discussion further. Post to your journal, or send me an email [mailto].

      -db

  • Why email junk mail is more annoying (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I check my regular mail once a day, in the evening. I grab it all out of the box, quickly go through it discarding the junk, and I'm done.

    Email on the other hand... it arrives all day long. And everytime it does, my computer makes a little noise. I get excited! I have new mail! So, I click over to check it, and everytime it's junk mail, I am saddened, and the new mail happiness dies off a bit more.

    Oh, and there's also the fact that since regular junk mail requires the sender to pay real money to send it, it tends to be of a slightly higher quality.
  • I'd setup a hotmail account for it. :)

    vipers_crap_mail@hotmail.com
  • The article doesn't say how to opt out. It says that the recipients can choose which companies' mail they'll accept.

    Could you sign up for spam delivery and not accept from any company? That would be a useful govt. service.
  • Just give them a fake email adress... problem solved, no more spam! Or you could always give them your buddy's email addy...
  • from:postmaster.sweden.gov.se
    to: spam.magnet@ahole.net

    Dear Citizen,
    I am writing this in order to have your opinion.......

    ---snip---

  • Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Perianwyr Stormcrow ( 157913 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:17PM (#3815441) Homepage
    If I choose to receive only spam, will my physical email box be free of physical bulkmail, then?

    If so, that's a cool idea.

    If not, where's the benefit?

    I can't tell which is the case, as I do not read Swedish, and the link is just to the main page (this is what would happen in a world where "deep linking" is disallowed! Total contextual disconnection.)
    • If I choose to receive only spam, will my physical email box be free of physical bulkmail, then?

      No, but you might get less. So far, only a few companies (AFAIK, they need to register with the Post Office) have gone for this, but it may be the same as with eInvoice (registered companies may send you an electronic invoice via your Internet bank for stuff like phone bills, utilities and insurances) that it will start to build up a momentum and then really take off as more and more senders as well as recipients get on the bandwagon. When everyone has gotten with the program, you can let birds nest in your mailbox.

      Total contextual disconnection

      Would this be called discontext or simply uncontextual? ;-)

      BTW, I see this as a strategic move for Posten - since they handle fewer and fewer paper mail messages each day and other carriers are competing with them for the package and parcel markets, they have recently closed a lot of their old post offices and are setting up shop in collaboration with gas stations, super markets and banks, separating the handling of "small" stuff like stamps and money (postal money orders, payments and so on) and "big" stuff like mail-order packages. This is just another step in that strategy - getting on the Internet train before the banks do it.

      This is basically a way to downsize the mailman and replace him with sendmail.

    • will my physical email box be free of physical bulkmail, then?

      I can almost guarantee it ;)
    • Even better, make a bit bucket account for opt-ins:

      adduser devnull

      and put a symlink of its mailbox to /dev/null

      All your spam problems solved.
  • It's easier to have an email spam filter. Actually fast to automate that then try to write a program that automaticaly scan incoming (physical) mail, and determin wether it's junk or not.
  • With email spam you have the option of using filters, for on thing. Clicking "delete" as soon as you see something is also an option that, while annoying, isn't *that* difficult.

    Junk mail on the other hand must be physically dealt with - thrown in the recycling bin or garbage.

    I think people get mmore annoyed with spam because it's a constant deluge, as opposed to regaular mail which most check just once a day. Still, spam is easier to deal with.
    • Except you can't heat your home with email. =]
    • My parent's house has a woodstove and paper junk mail was a good means of lowering heating costs.

      Lets see spam do that.

    • A "NO JUNK MAIL" sticker on my mailbox works great for me.

      Bork!
    • Actually, I don't think that's true.

      When the snail mail comes, it comes only once a day. You can generally easily identify which ones are spam, and toss them in the recycle bin kept in the garage for that purpose. It takes a few seconds.

      So while it's annoying, it's not that hard to deal with.

      Compare that to email. Every so often, throughout the day, email shows up. Every time it does, you have to interrupt whatever you're thinking about to look at it, and discard it if it's spam. Filters help a good deal with this, but the very fact that by nature email gets delivered at random times rather than in batch makes it more intrusive.

      Now, the major benefit to switching physical spam to email is that physical mail has a bunch of environmental consequences -- use of paper, landfill space or use of chemicals an energy in recycling, use of energy in delivery, and so on. Email takes up many fewer resources per mail.

      - target


  • mmmm .... spam! I love it!

    Do they throw in bread and mustard in with the deal?

  • It lets me know when my postwoman has arrived.

    Junk email, on the other hand, merely lets me know when my mail server has crashed, which is much less often.

  • If this were happening in America... (Score:4, Funny)

    by RumGunner ( 457733 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:19PM (#3815466) Homepage
    They could just save time and declare bankruptcy now. I read that article this morning.

    Honestly, how do they expect people to react to this? "I can get spam from the government? Yippee!"
    • I think you may have missed something...as you sign up for this service, you get to provide the address that the spam goes to. You now have a much easier way of filtering this spam than with the normal variety.

      Plus, you no longer receive this crap in your meat-space mailbox.

      So yes, 'Yippee'!

      -Ben
  • all you need is a "no junk mail" or "no flyers" sing on your front door and it cuts it down 90% at least.. if they still deliver it, you can call up and complain, yell at the 10 year old kid who's delivering it.
  • NOT. If you've got e-mail how often do you send letters in the real mail. I guess a business would send more than a home user. If this discout applied to packages and international mailings that would be better. Even better than that "my e-mail address is joeshmoe@hotmail.com, send me spam and give me a discount". Sounds like a good deal to me. I do nothing, you spam some crappy e-mail box, and I get cheaper mail, when I use it once a month to pay my two bills.
  • This is great! Let junk pile up in the ePostbox, get a real e-mail account and use that instead, and never get paper junk mail again! Finally, a use for spam!
  • 2002-07-02 22:22:05 US price for stamps goes up, Sweden goes digital (askslashdot,news) (rejected)
    • Remember that bulk mail (aka junk mail) subsidizes postage in the US (recent postage increases notwithstanding).

      If they go to "spam", then postage goes up even more.
      • According to the summary (always an iffy proposition), businesses would get to send you their e-spam at a per piece cost of 3/4 of their snail-spam rates. I would hazard a rough guess that the overall total the post office would get would be roughly the same (no numbers as proof, just a hunch).
  • Why would any consumer CHOOSE to have spam delivered to them? Wouldn't 99.99% just say "No thanks, I'd rather not subscribe to your spam service."?

    Regards, Guspaz.
  • It costs me 4 cents a meg to receive spam.

    It costs the spammer 5 to 70 cents to send me junk mail.

    Unfortunately, I can't spamassassin my (non-E) mailbox.

    S
  • Now if they offered some kind of sanction against the spammer. Say a few cents for every physical letter that was delivered when it should have gone as e-mail.

    THAT might give some encouragement to register.

    As it stands registration just gives the spammer another chance to find you.

  • Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lostchicken ( 226656 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:21PM (#3815496)
    If a company wanted to use junk email, they would send junk email for nearly free.

    I only see the headers of my virtual junk mail, real junk mail sits in my trash can for a while, while I stare at it. The time of my staring at the flyer is worth much more to a company than the quarter second of visibility in my inbox, and that's why they pay for real mail.

    Also when the postal service's IP hits the blacklist, it's all over.
    • "If a company wanted to use junk email, they would send junk email for nearly free."

      But this isn't the same sort of junk email. Unlike spam, this is something of an opt-in scenario. The recipient provided his/her email address so as to receive the digital alternates of real-world junkmail. A sender using this system (ideally) wouldn't have to worry about any sort of anti-spam attacks -- no abuse complaints to their ISP, no anti-spammers attempting get their website taken down, no threat of being blacklisted.

  • Since the advent of spam email, I've been receiving less junk mail at home.
  • Sign up for that. Have all of their email go to spambox@yourdomain.blah, and forward all mail sent to that address, to either vipul's razor, or to /dev/null. Now *both* of your boxes are free of spam. :-)

  • junk mail over spam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MarvinMouse ( 323641 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:25PM (#3815538) Homepage Journal
    For a bunch of reasons, I find junk mail far more enjoyable then spam.

    1. Junk mail costs the sender totally, I don't spend a cent. While spam costs me download time, bandwidth, and a bunch more.

    2. Junk mail is tactile. When it's good, it's nice to read through a brochure or flyer. when it's bad, it's nice to feel and hear the sound of it hit the recycling bin. E-mail is just annoying all around.

    3. I enjoy receiving junk mail, it means someone actually is willing to spend money to reach me. I hate receiving spam, it means someone has stolen my e-mail from somewhere and is charging me for their advertising.

    4. Junk mail comes with coupons which are sometimes useful. At the very most, you'll have to print out the coupons received through e-mail, or only buy through online sites.

    5. Junk mail arrives once a day at a set time. Not every 5 minutes annoying me endlessly at work while I am waiting for slightly more important e-mails.

    So naturally given the option, you can see why I would prefer Junk mail via post over spam e-mail. E-mail should be reserved for correspondances and important communications that need to be received and responded to quickly. Snail mail can be used for the rest of the junk. (Plus, with all of the virii out there I get enough crap without needing to worry about junk mail.

    • Re:junk mail over spam (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bmalia ( 583394 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:37PM (#3815655) Journal
      The article says that "To send mail through ePostbox, companies pay about 2 kronor (19 cents) per item, some 25 percent less than it would cost to have the mail delivered by carriers."
      Since they are paying for it, it is different from the normal spam. They'll probably target an audience (and do a spell check!) before they send it off. I'd probably sign up if they were to send me a coupon for a free pint of Ben & Jerry's every month. Anyway, I'm just pointing out that these SHOULD be a higher quality spam that what we're used to.
    • If you use qmail, sign up for this service with an address like: username-posten@your.domain.net, and then create a .qmail-posten file in your home directory to stuff it all in a special folder, or delete it.

      Problem solved. As this is the address that all 'junk' mail from posten will go to for this service, you can trade your bandwidth for the frustrations of having to deal with this mail at all.

      I'd be quite happy with this solution.

      -Ben
    • 1. Junk mail costs the sender totally, I don't spend a cent. While spam costs me download time, bandwidth, and a bunch more.
      Unless you find global warming has no cost to you. Junk mail costs us money in disposal charges, but more importantly, destroy large parts of our rain forests for the paper. And odds are, you aren't recycling that junk mail are you?
    • Imagine if each piece of spam you received also gave you a 3 cent credit to your ISP account (or you, if you're your own ISP)

      Would that really be any better?

      -- this is not a .sig

  • Great. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cjpez ( 148000 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:26PM (#3815552) Homepage Journal
    How about they just not send me unsolicited advertisements at all?
    • How would you know about wonderful products and proactive services like the Flowbee, spray on hair, loans that come in the form of prefilled out checks with 20% APR, "Space Bags", Taplights, "Internal Antenna" cell phone scams, Herbal Viagra, and many other things neccessary to survive in today's ever-changing marketplace?
      • You see, maybe that's my problem. I don't get interesting spam like that. The only ones I get are herbal viagra, and occasionally some boring ones about loans (no prefilled checks, though). "Space Bags?" That's brilliant. What I wouldn't give to be able to read about Space Bags! Taplights sound promising, too.

        Maybe if somebody offered an option to get more interesting spam I'd be more excited. :P

  • Junkmail vs. Spam (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nuxx ( 10153 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:28PM (#3815563) Homepage
    I, personally, would happily take spam over real, physical junk mail any day. Every day I go to the mail box, checking for bills and the occasional real letter. Almost all I ever receive are junk mail, credit card offers, and crappy ad-funded local newspapers. I'd imagine that I fill a kitchen sized garbage can once a month with junkmail. That's a LOT. Imagine if your whole neighborhood received that much? Your county? Your state? What a waste of paper...

    Give me spam any day. At least I can write filters to eliminate most of it, costing only a few bits. At least I'm not destroying trees, filling up landfills, and spewing chemicals all over.

    -Steve

    PS: You can cut down on some junkmail by calling 1-888-567-8688 to opt out of preapproved credit card offers. It won't get rid of all of them, but it'll cut down on those twice-daily offers of high interest plastic.

  • Polite Spammer (Score:5, Funny)

    by scott1853 ( 194884 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:28PM (#3815571)
    I just got an e-mail last night from a spammer that's getting blocked by our little BSD postfix box. The very politely asked us to check on our server to make sure they weren't inadvertantly being marked as spammers.

    They went on to explain how they were only an opt-in service and proceeded to list all the mail servers from which they send spam from.

    I'll admit it was a nice gesture. It was especially nice of them to give us a complete list since we only had a couple of their boxes in the black list.

  • It's the obvious solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by strredwolf ( 532 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:31PM (#3815603) Homepage Journal
    1. Customers opt-in to get spam (in which case, it's not spam now).
    2. Merchants pay more than the ISP connection for the service
    3. The goverment controls delivery, and gets money for it.

    I'd say the US Postal Service should take Sweden's lead!
    • Preferably
      4. Single source of SPAM to opt out of or just plain block
    • The US post office should offer an email box. The email box will charge, say, $0.10 for each message delivered to it. Ideally, you would be able to pick people who can deliver to your email box for free. This way, legit companies can reach you through targetted advertising that you may be interested in, and your friends can still communicate with you for free.

      If someone not on your free list tries to send a message to you, the post office will check their account to see if the funds are available. If not, the message bounces back to the person. Companies, and spammers in particular, would think twice about sending a million messages if doing so cost them $100,000.
  • Well, who needs Carnivore in such an environment? The government can look at whatever records are sent to you. Phone bills, credit cards. Great privacy.
  • I can delete it with the touch of a button...no trip to the recycling bin, no wad of junk paper that had to be hand delivered to my house. Like it or not, it could lead to a more efficient postal system (at least here in US), by getting alot of the junk out of carriers hands, thus making it possible to perhaps receive snail mail every other day, and maybe allowing the postal service to halve the number of employed carriers. This would result in a trimmer operation, saving money, lowering postal rates, cleaning the air and water and allowing us to leave our doors unlocked at night. Oh wait, the government runs the post office....never mind! :)

    The above is only 50% sarcasm!

  • the hidden benefit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:35PM (#3815637)
    There is a major benefit to this approach that was not mentioned: Once the Swedish post office starts making that 19 cents per piece of spam, the Swedish government will look twice at all the spammers who are sending UCE directly without paying. While I certainly wouldn't want the government to stick it's nose so far into e-mail that any e-mail was taxed (and I expect this would be the final result), this should lead to some serious anti-spam laws with teeth in them. If done here in the U.S., and followed up with anti-(direct)-spam laws and serious enforcement, I'm certain it would significantly decrease the amount of spam sent to me each day.
  • if we all go back to smoke signals, we wouldn't have these sorts of things, it's great communication for disasters, they can't hound you with advertisements....and most of all, we can use spam to fuel it, not just the spam mail, but burning the people behind the spam alive...yes, a nice fiery inferno, and we could dance around it and celebrate...do you think IPoSS will work (internet protocol over smoke signal) with a non-return to zero encoding scheme?
  • I can't help but think that if I were a bulk mailer, and this caught on, it would make physical mailing much more valuable to me. A person would be more likely to look at the junk I send them, if there were less of it in their box. Real bulkmailers are likely to catch on to this pretty quick. It might have an effect not unlike wehat happens when everyone decides to take a shortcut to beat the traffic.

    Also, think about the tactics used to make junk mail look official. That goes out the window with eMail.

    It would be nice to save paper, though. Then again, one thing I like to do is to mail back the business reply envelopes empty.
    • Also, think about the tactics used to make junk mail look official. That goes out the window with eMail.

      What, they cant make an email look like it came from somewhere official? Actually, a far more common spam practice is to make the email look like something from someone you know, which has the same effect: make you open it.

      From: "Dave"
      Subject: Re: that report you sent me

      From: "Bob"
      Subject: Friday night
      And so on.
  • Won't it automatically become solicited commercial e-mail if the customer opts in for it?

    SpamBouncer [slashdot.org] is the best weapon against spam!

  • I remember in the good ol' uu-net days when you were charged per e-mail and news posting. The concept of spamming was a theoretical concept because who would be willing to pay for sending out all those e-mails?
  • Did anybody else realize how great this could be? Sign up for this service with a junk mail account (I have 2) and let it flow. This keeps your physical mail box clean, and you can check the legit SPAM whenever you want. There have to be drawbacks! Are there?
  • Both at the last apartment I lived and at the current one, I spoke to either the manager or the mail carrier and they put a little dot on my mailbox; this was a signal to the mail carrier and others that I do not want junk mail, flyers, etc. Now I get the occasional ad from something I'm already signed up for, but it's almost nothing.

    The mail carriers are an understanding lot, at least here in Canada, it seems. :)

  • NEW SPAM now with "Mechanically seperated Snail" I can see it now, soon we may all join or sweedish buddies. The government does this? isn't this some sort of cruel and unusual punishment?
  • How about just making it illegal to send junk mail, spam, and telemarketing except to those who opt in? This is a democracy (in US) after all, seems like >50% of the people would be for this.
    • Sorry to bust your bubble, but Sweden is not part of the United States. Since I've gone this far, I should clarify that this means they aren't subject to the laws of our democracy.
  • Great, another instance in which a government outlaws something, only to turn around and offer the service under a "regulated" scheme for their own profit.
  • From what I read in the article this service would be primarily used to deal with bulk mailing of stuff the user would actually want, like government forms (housing cited in the article) and banking documents. As this is a pure opt in service, it seems unlikely people will opt for mailings from busineesses they are not interested in. This kind of shift is represented here with things like efiling and online banking.
  • I like this idea for a number of reasons. First of all, people need to realize that the type of spam they'd be getting would be nowhere near the types of "illegal" spam. I don't ever recall getting penis enlargement ads or "hot teen spring beach" ads in my physical mailbox. Secondly, who's to say that you don't just give them an email address aliased to /dev/null? You'd then be killing 2 birds with one stone. =)
  • Ok, the reason this might work in Sweden is that the postal service has credibility, that people in Sweden care more about the environment (paper mills smell like hell) than other peoples money and that the postal service has all the address records anyway, kind of like social services in the US so there is no real privacy threat other than there already is.

    The reason this won't work is that if you stick a note with "no advertising" on your mailbox you don't get any junk mail (direct advertising at least), plus you can collect the junk mail over time and stuff it in any office of the company that sent it for them to recycle.

  • Recycle Direct (Score:5, Funny)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:57PM (#3815841) Homepage
    What I want is Recycle Direct. The USPS already has a semi-automated system for rerouting mail using forwarding addresses. I want to be able to specify a separate forwarding address for my junk mail. Something like "Buffalo Paperboard Corporation, The Big Dumpster In Back, 470 Ohio Street, Lockport New York, USA 14094".

    Mailers should be able to tell that I've done this, just as they can now run address files through the USPS and get forwarding addresses substituted and old addresses deleted. That would be an opt-out list with teeth.

  • All from one site? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pla ( 258480 )
    Oh yeah, I'd *jump* at the chance to sign up it something similar appeared in the US.

    Imagine the convenience of only having to block *one* spam site, something like "spam.usps.gov"... Ahh, gives me a warm and tingly feeling just thinking of the possibility.

  • Ingen Reklam Tack (Score:3, Informative)

    by ZaneMcAuley ( 266747 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @02:08PM (#3815919) Homepage Journal

    "INGEN REKLAM TACK"

    Thats all you need to stick on your post box or door. You dont get crapmail then. Except kommun (community stuff and real letters etc).

    Simple. Works. Nay problemo.
  • This is an interesting question, and not simple as it seems. A government portal for advertisement would be useful, if the quality were up to the standards of junk mail. People might lactually look at such mail, which would be a benifit to the advertiser. Advertiser might also spend some time and effort created good TV quality advertising on the web, which would help the slumping IT sector. If the cost per message were kept high, the adversiters would still be funding the postal service, which would be important. We will get more email, but there would be less of an excuse for spam. Face it, email is much simpler to discard than paper mail. An email pointing to a web site could be much better than paper mail.

    Now the problem. In the US junk mail probably justifies and pays for a large part of the U.S. postal service. If we went to such a plan we would lose something, at least we would not have six day a week mail delivery. We might even have to pay more to mail a letter, which might not be so important as people are mailing less letters. On the other hand, we might some commercial demand for subsidized internet, for example, wider broadband.

  • I can take it down the street and dump it in the mail box on the corner. If it's crap from some list I'm on I write "RETURN TO SENDER" on it first.

    You want to litter in my mail box? Well I can litter in yours.

    I wish everyone would do this. I wonder how long it would take them to get the message if half the mail they had to sort through was just trash.
  • This should be a wholly subsidised by the advertisers.

    Why should anyone pay to download spam out of their own pocket ?. The advertisers are getting a clean optin list without doing anything other than registering with the post office. So instead of being a hit or miss situation they get a fully vetted list of inetrested parties. This is a valueadd proposition for them.

    But I don't see any advantage for the users unless the Postal service subsidises teh access or bandwidth.

  • Get off the list for US citizens (Score:3, Informative)

    by autocracy ( 192714 ) <slashdot2007.storyinmemo@com> on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @02:33PM (#3816109) Homepage
    Want to cut down on your physical junk mail? Try this site: http://www.usps.com/websites/depart/inspect/fraud/ GetOffMailingLists.htm [usps.com]. Also offers removal from phone and e-mail lists too. See page for specific details.

  • This is a great idea. Dear Postal Service: Please stop sending junk mail to my mailbox and instead send email to my emailbox. My email address is null@nowhere.nodomain. Thanks!

  • Do they plan to send part of the proceeds from each spam to the ISP who receives it, and/or the direct recipient of the mail should they be paying by the byte (like myself)?

    If not, I'd consider this a fraudulent way of making money.
    • It seems a lot of people don't get it.

      This isn't about spam. This is about an alternative to dead-tree-based mail. The way the system is built you sign up for what kind of messages you want, and from whom you want them. If you don't want virus-laden, web-bug-ridden breast-enlargement ads, don't sign up for them.

      The thing is, this isn't SMTP e-mail. This is a closed messaging system. All messages in the system are digitally signed and authenticated. Sender's can't hide their identities, which means that it's easy for you to refuse mail from any particular sender.

      The ISPs don't really enter into it since the service is accessed through the postal service's web servers. There isn't even forwarding (there is notification via regular e-mail).

      To sum it up, this is a managed, secure, opt-in service. If you don't like the terms, you don't sign up and it won't cost you a dime. You can hardly expect a better deal than that.
  • I am very familiar with Posten's service, as I work for NETdelivery, one of the vendors that provided the technology used to implement this system.

    The primary purpose for this service is to enable its users to receive, view, and pay their bills in a secure online environment from one trusted location. In addition, patrons of this service can subscribe and opt in to content offerings they are interested in receiving, such as online magazines, newsletters, and marketing offers for which they have expressed an interest.

    Posten has paid a great deal of attention to preventing spam in its system by limiting access to mass mailing capabilities to only companies who have paid to participate. Once the companies have paid to participate, they can only send content to their current snail-mail customers or customers who subscribe through the service. Those customers must then enter a subscription key to begin receiving the content.

    Canada Post is also offering a similar service using NETdelivery's technology, and it is being well received by its patrons.

    Personally, I would be thrilled if the US Postal service would provide such an offering so I could receive and pay my bills online from the one trusted service provider. The only options that are currently available require me to have my bills snail mailed to the provider where they scan the bill (and really, who knows who has access to the paper version of the bill) and present it to me online. I'd also love it because I could eliminate all that paper that goes to the recycle bin, and even limit the information that I see by choosing not to subscribe to it.

  • Real easy question to answer for me. Even if your spam account is free, you're still the one paying for the computer to access it, the phone line to dial in from, the electricity your computer runs off of, etc. Junk mailers pay 100% of the delivery costs. Period. All push, no pull. Not even telemarketers do that.

    "it raises an interesting question as to which one is less annoying, environmental benefits aside."

    Hrm... biodegradable paper (often post-consumer recycled content) or computers running off of coal-fired plants? Decisions, decisions...

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