No, mass mail receives a significant discount. At most add to economies of scale, but with significant costs.

Look at the actual numbers, and it’s not nearly as significant as the bulk would suggest. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/revenue-pieces-...

That's why they killed Outbox, which could block paper spam. They later started running that service themselves (until they decide the security challenges are not worth it):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/12/08/usps-l...

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/11/u-s-secret-service-warns...

Emailing a photo of the front of an envelope, as Informed Delivery does, is very different from opening mail addressed to another person. I beleive I’m remembering correctly that when I looked into Outbox in 2014, they required a Power of Attorney!

When I signed up for Informed Delivery, I had to show id at a USPS office. Seems like fairly strong authentication when compared to any other web or mail service.

You could sign up for Informed Deliverey online with just an address. There was no verification whatsoever.

The usps is in league with paper spammers.

The Lumber Cartel

I would gladly pay the extra tax to opt out.

I went three or four months without checking my mail and eventually they gave up and stopped delivering my mail entirely, which was a welcome surprise. Unfortunately the 0.1% of mail that is useful forced me to rectify the issue.

The USPS is not directly funded by taxes.

Forbes says that they're effectively funded by tax payers to the tune of $18 billion a year.

http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/

That’s adding the value of supposeded benefits from congress but not actual dollars. Also congress mandates crazy shit that the usps must do so any benefits are probably wiped out by them.

I think giving someone a tax break or low-interest rate is basically the same thing as giving someone the dollars to pay that tax or interest. Calling that a 'supposed' benefit is silly.

Forbes' assessment is the effective value is $18 billion.

Is it not the other way around? I would think that the USPS subsidizes paper spam. I find it very hard to believe that paper spamming would be even remotely economically viable at market cost.

If you look at the mass mailing options that the USPS markets on their website, they ask you to basically buy a whole delivery route at a time.

There's no routing and sorting they have to do. The carrier just picks up a stack of letters at the start of the shift, and drops one in every mailbox.

The labor cost that the USPS has to put in for a mass mailing is a fraction of what it has to do for normal mailing.

There is another cost - the cost to society of paper garbage and dead trees. I live in a 200+ unit apartment building and recently received a mailer for hedge cutting. I promptly went to the mailroom recycling bin and threw it out, discovering about 150 identical copies thrown out by other unit residents. Obviously no one in a building needs hedge cutting — we live in apartments, not houses — but the mailer didn’t care or put much thought into even basic ad targeting. What a waste.

Why would USPS subsidize spam? What’s the upside to them? They have literally no incentive I can think of to do that.

They subsidize it by charging a rate per piece that is less than a regular stamped mailing, but at a price level that still turns a profit.

It's market segmentation, full price service for those willing to pay it, and a cheaper option for business without enough margins to justify that.

Let me clarify my argument. Ostensibly, the goal of the USPS is to connect all of America with flat-rate first-class mail. The USPS charges as much to send a letter across the country as it does to send it to your apartment neighbor. That means that people in cities (or really, people in routes with high density first-class mail usage) subsidize people in lower-density areas. Let’s assume that we agree that this goal is reasonable, and thus that this subsidy of low-density customers by high-density customers is reasonable.

This means that mass-mailers are being subsidized by the USPS’ implementation of this goal of nationwide first-class mail, because presumably they are paying less than the actual cost of mailing their advertisements. I suppose we could go a step further, and say that high-density customers are in fact subsidizing mass-mailers, which I think most people would agree is not a reasonable subsidy.

Same in the UK with Royal Mail (which is now privatised, but it was true before that too).