That'd be awesome, but I expect there'd be significant pushback from the direct mail advertising industry that makes up a good chunk of the postal service's revenue.

Not the direct mail industry itself, but the postal service which earns a significant amount of it's revenue from them. Your mail carrier happily delivers any and all unwanted mail in the interest of their continued employment.

Honestly, I don't mind junk mail that much.

- It's slightly depressing to come home to no new mail (I know, that's just a weird mental thing for me).

- More importantly, it helps keep the postal service afloat, something that I think is an important service.

-- It keeps a sizable chunk of U.S. government workers employed. Employed is good.

-- It acts as a proxy wellness check for elderly and rural citizens.

-- It lets Grandma cheaply send me a card and $20 for my birthday. Email and Venmo just doesn't cut it.

> "- It's slightly depressing to come home to no new mail (I know, that's just a weird mental thing for me)."

100% agree. I still enjoy getting the mail every day after I get home from work. I even find the junk mail interesting, in a "Why in the world did they send this to me?" type of way.

Interesting because I don't even check my mail every day...on average every 4 business days or so. So I'm guaranteed to have mail. I petitioned the HOA in my townhouse neighborhood to install trash cans at all the mailboxes. Otherwise I'm just carrying trash into my house to throw away.

What about the environmental impact of printing all those useless letters and flyers?

Couldn't that material be better put to use elsewhere?

Yeah. There's the occasional semi-important thing I don't notice because it got tangled up in a pile of mail I'd been throwing in a box. But I flip through catalogs every now and then and don't have a problem with throwing out obvious credit card offers unopened.

In the grand scheme of annoyances that include telemarketers, throwing out some mail every day is pretty minor.

It does clog up my mailbox but since I swapped out for an extra-giant one that isn't really a problem any longer.

I find something oddly therapeutic about tearing up credit card offers before tossing them in the recycle bin.

The bundle of grocery store ads that comes every Tuesday, I could do without. I don't shop at any of the included stores, but the bundle has such a mish-mash of odd sized circulars that I have to go through it since important mail gets mixed in frequently.

What I'd really like is to get all the spammers to pay a fraction of my utilities bill.

You send me spam, which goes directly in the recycle bin, a service that I pay for from my wallet - you need to pay up for the privilege.

If you hate junk mail, you'll LOVE this trick!

If a piece of junk mail has a postage-paid return envelope included, take everything else, stuff it in there, and mail the whole thing back.

Doesn't pay your utility bill, but feels oh so righteous :)

Or tape the return envelope to a brick (with clear packing tape). In my experience the post office is happy to take it.

Have you really done this?

I remember another HNer saying they have a bunch of letter size wood blanks that they mail back in the postage-paid, by weight, envelope!

Glorious!!

There are several services that do this.

1. give you a mailbox

2. scan outside of all incoming mail

3. allow you to select which ones to open

4. scan the contents

5. optionally forward items you need physical

6. dispose of everything else

Link?

I'm currently a customer of https://www.usglobalmail.com , just one of many services like this. They scan mail, can throw it away for you, and can repack / reship packages.

I've contemplated using a service like this to lighten the junk mail, but how do you 'shut off' mail service at your physical mailbox?

You probably can't, honestly.

My apartment, on a weekly basis, gets mail to roughly 3-5 previous inhabitants. As in, exact same address, etc.

Sometimes even bills from insurance companies or other important mail.

I think when you move you're supposed to notify USPS to forward mail to your new address (probably also inform important mailers of the move as well) but from what I've seen they don't propagate the address changes very well.

I mean, sure, those previous inhabitants may not have notified USPS at all, but I find that hard to believe.

USPS only forwards the mail for one year after notification. After that any mail that is still marked for that address will be delivered there. Ideally you would have notified all relevant parties at that point.

Also a lot of junk mail will be addressed to the name "or current resident"

However, the forwarding database is apparently pretty easy to get access to. Junk mailers will query it and update their list with your new address.

> I think when you move you're supposed to notify USPS to forward mail to your new address

> sure, those previous inhabitants may not have notified USPS at all, but I find that hard to believe

I certainly wouldn't. Why would I notify the USPS that I moved? I would notify my contacts (or much more likely, they'd ask me for my address in the event they wanted to send me something). A delivery service is for delivering things to addresses, not to people.

> A delivery service is for delivering things to addresses, not to people.

A delivery service is for delivering things to people; addresses are just a tool for locating the perosn you are trying to get the thing delivered to.

Try getting them to deliver to a person using some other location than an address, such as "wherever he happens to be". It can't be their purpose to do something they're not able to do.

If I have something mailed to me at my office, are you claiming the post office hasn't made a mistake when they deliver it to my home?

> Try getting them to deliver to a person using some other location than an address

So, like, General Delivery?

> If I have something mailed to me at my office, are you claiming the post office hasn't made a mistake when they deliver it to my home?

There's a question of principal/agent there, so maybe, maybe not.

OTOH, I'll maintain that the post office is not making a mistake when it keeps delivering my mail from my employer to me at my actual address, even though they keep sending it to an address which resembles mine only in that the street name and zip code are the same, and two of the four numbers in the street address they use also appear (in different positions) in my actual address.

Which I suppose I should go talk to HR about again.

General Delivery is meant for the use of people who don't have an address (or as a substitute for a PO Box), and has to be arranged by the recipient, and the recipient may only receive General Delivery at a single location. So no, not like General Delivery -- General Delivery is an address, the address of the post office offering it, which is where the person receives their mail.

What happens when you miss giving notice to one of your contacts? What if your contact doesn't update their records right away? How do you get the timing just right? Not having your mail sent to a new address before you move in nor having any mail arrive after you've left your old address?

There is value in updating your address. Ideally, you won't need a year to get things sorted, but a couple of months is certainly valuable.

>> much more likely, they'd ask me for my address in the event they wanted to send me something

You're trying to invoke the fear that the only method of contacting your friend is to write to the last address you knew for them. That was true once; it has no particular relationship to the modern day.

Even when it was true, though, postal services were a system for delivering mail to places, not to people. If your friend moved and you didn't know that, it was difficult to contact them.

By not having a physical mailbox. Nothing says that you have to have a mailbox, and without one the USPS won't deliver mail to your house. Also, I believe that they have some sort of permanent forward that the local postmaster can put in so that if you don't have a mailbox at home they'll send it to a PO box.

place a sticker inside with someone elses name on it

I use https://www.earthclassmail.com/.

The subject of Startup Junkies, season 1, a fairly interesting thing to watch. Not sure if there was a season 2.

There wasn't! We've talked about doing a follow up as recently as last year.

The company has gone through a lot of changes since then, for the better.

We'll have some exciting announcements in the coming months as well.