> I honestly wish I could deny-all by default. Hey email solved this problem for me for email and I want an equivalent type of service for phone and text, now.

I would love an information-lock based system. Basically those "What's your mother's maiden name?" security questions, but repurpose them so other people have to answer them before they contact me.

I'm pretty sure even a basic "What is my name?" security question would eliminate most spam. For those more infuriated by spam, you could set it to something random and effectively have a password to contact you.

In the UK politicians also send out these kinds of flyers in bulk (never mind the inundation of flyers for takeaway food, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, etc.)

For any single piece of legitimate mail (which is vanishingly small as most stuff is paperless now), there are perhaps 20 or 30 pieces of junk that come with it over the course of a few weeks.

I honestly wish it got legislated against. Junk mailers aren't entitled to offload their waste through my letterbox. I don't understand why they have the right to shove advertisements into my own home.

[adndm] no posties cant [as in not allowed] remove anything, even if they just put it in there and realized its the wrong address

Allowing bulk spam mail to use that channel of contact is contrary to its purpose. It's not a place where I get high priority messages with delivery confirmation to make sure I get them anymore. It's a place where random flyers get stuffed, and the government insists on mixing their messages into that stream of crap.

USPS should stop bulk delivery entirely and have FedEx and UPS do it. They're not allowed to put stuff in my mailbox (and literally can't, because they don't have keys). At least then we restore the line. Things in the mailbox are important. Things that get left on my doorstep might be, but probably aren't.

https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/2062562/

I would happily pay (napkin maths) $40-50 more in taxes per person per year to make this fucking stop.

Shit, it'd save my city some money. Less trash.

No, this won't eliminate it. It will give you less of it, though, and give the USPS more money. Win/win, even if we don't win as much as we would like.

Bulk mail currently gets a discount compared to individual letters. Eliminate that, and we'd see less bulk mail.

I have lots of problems w/crypto, but one thing they've gotten right is the credibility of self-binding. Without that, it's just hard to trust any actor on their future behavior---from Reagan's immigration amnesty, to cable tv's ads, to funding government agencies that ("this time") will fix a problem.

(None of this is motivated by any dislike for USPS, which I generally like. I'm just talking about people's (imo justified) reluctance to trade the known for the unknown).

Genuine question, is it even an option to pay $X more and get an otherwise identical TV with no overlay ads? It's admittedly been 7 or 8 years since I last purchased a TV, but I don't remember such an option being available at the time, and the only time I can ever remember seeing that sort of choice being available was with the kindle, where it's very explicit that the ad-free (but otherwise identical) version is like $20 more (or, was when I bought my kindle, which again was many years ago).

That being said, I'd be extremely curious to see sales numbers for ad-free vs ad-laden kindles, although I sort of doubt I'll ever have the chance to.

I've never lived in the US and I do hear that perhaps it isn't particularly efficient with tax money, but still, if you looked at the average tax paid instead of your own it might not be nearly so amazing?

https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue

I'm not sure what other things to take into account. For example it says tax collected in Luxemberg is $44k per capita. Vs USA at $16k per capita. I'm sure another issue is 20% of USA taxes going to military?

Of othe places I've actually spent significant time, Singapore and Japan seemed to have pretty great government services and their taxes collected per person are lower than the USA. But I also know their cultures are different and that there are less people that need government support

Unfortunately, it's high maintenance, and it doesn't take too much of a lapse to get back up to the usual junk load. But I occasionally like to daydream that, if we could get enough people in the USA to do this, the junk mail industry itself might become financially untenable.

Actually, returning an unopened USPS-shipped letter or package doesn't cost postage at all. They probably removed you since you essentially took the time to communicate that they're not going to succeed with any future mail.

- slap “refused — return to sender” stickers on all the junk and drop it in bins for USPS

- bundle your actual mail and deliver it

Once a month, a service pickes it up, then leaves a dumpster of spam next to the local USPS mail drop. (Or shovels it over the counter at the post office.)

Also, provide a list of houses subscribed to the service to the USPS. The ball's in their court now!

- postal worker comes every day, with pre-sorted bins and leaves with outgoing bins; businesses already do this.

- first you re-sort the pre-sorted personal mail to remove spam, preserving the post office sort to keep it by customer

- then you sort all the removed junk by sender you’re returning to

— and when your next mail arrives, you give the USPS worker the pre-sorted outbound mail of returned junk

- keep a Instagram of your piles of returned junk mail, every day

This already happens with, eg, university or large office mailrooms. So you’re not asking anything new if USPS to make it work.

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

It seems like they could just get everything about you. Total and complete identity theft

EDIT - can't get the form to submit without an error anyways. We're sorry!

An error has occured while processing this page. Please try again.

Same thing happened to me. I just refreshed the page, confirmed form resubmission, and it worked.

Don't rely on email for important things.

I agree, that it's annoying in the meantime though.

But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.

Aside from using Gmail, which has quite good spam filtering, my solution to email spam is siloing: using a separate email account for different categories of account sign-ups, etc. I just checked my 'good' email's spam folder, and there's nothing there - I get maybe one spam email every few months. (In order to reduce friction, I have autoforwarding from other emails, which doesn't resend spam with gmail - but there are other solutions which would presumably work for any email provider).

The only downside is, with paid email accounts, this could be monetarily problematic - which I don't really see a solution for, unfortunately. But, it's definitely way easier to filter email spam than physical/phone spam.

I'm a happy customer.

It doesnt stop the possibility that a legitimate other person with your contact details does the "share address book" with some shitty app. Its not you who has to fail - its ANYBODY in your contact network.

Spam works because most of these mass communication channels are free or extremely cheap. Raise the price and economics will dictate that most of these communications will drop off.

Mail? Probably 90+% ads. Email? Hahaha, I only even bother to check it anymore when I know a messages is coming in, and that's usually from a machine. Phone? Ignore-if-not-in-contacts, probably 2x as many spam calls as real calls in a week. Text might be close to 50% but only because transactional texts (lazy 2FA implementations and prescription pick-up reminders, mostly) count as signal.

OPSEC-wise I have a dedicated account for a certain kind of account. But what does the institution that uses that email address do? Send me 10X the email load with upsell nonsense, despite having opted out of all marketing emails.

No. Just, no. Stop. I am sick of this noise, and manually taking time to opt-out raises my switching cost. "Drowning" is a fantastic way to describe this.

And, "The vehicle warranty is about to expire"? Yeah, which vehicle? They won't get specific because they don't know.

I don't know how to implement it, but a "who are you specifically?" filter would eliminate a lot of my phone spam.

Otherwise, your call looks exactly like spam, so either you will get ignored, or that person has to answer all calls from unknown numbers.

I've made the same assumption and been wrong. It might be a bigger assumption than you realize. Maybe they just got a new phone, and their contact list wasn't synced correctly.

There is no reason voice mail should be limited to 3 messages.

None of them knew it was possible to spoof your phone number. Some thought I was lying and that I had been leaving voicemails as a prank. I'm sure most of them would have fallen for whatever scams these people were peddling.

It's fun to imagine old cranks replying to Viagra spam and forwarding chain emails, but the reality is far darker.

Beware that some websites use this "legitimately":

I ordered some stuff from Ikea and asked that it get delivered. Ikea forwarded the request to a third party, TaskRabbit. I now get TaskRabbit email spam to my ikea.com@ per-website email. And no matter how many times I unsubscribe from TaskRabbit the spam still comes.

Spam detection successful! I just put @taskrabbit.com into the blackhole and call it a day. If I get more spam to ikea.com@ then it will also get blackholed. I already won't buy anything else from Ikea for something as dumb as this.

A) if more people make a fuss about their email getting sold the way OP did, we can still salvage something out of the situation

B) results/outcomes are not the only reason people why should do things. After all, we lionize those Russians protesting the Ukraine invasion knowing nothing will come out of it at a personal level.

Society would be way better if we made a collective action to lobby our Congress to change the laws and make it illegal. Tech has been unregulated for far too long and there's too many bad actors taking advantage of this.

(No affiliation beyond being a happy customer.)

$15/year (plus the cost of the domain)

Currently using the middle tier and have been very happy with it.

Note that codified aliases are limited, but you can create a catch-all account. I have not needed to codify aliases to send "as" one of those accounts.

Actually have to step up to $5/month (per user) to get custom domain names.

Final pricing is still TBD but if you join the beta list, we are handing out huge discounts which’ll bring your effective cost between $5-15/month for everything.

There’s even a group of spammers that call twice back to back, I think to get around the setting that allows double calls to come through.

My iPhone helps a bit in that it will ring if I’ve ever called that number before.

It’s funny because I think having a setting where only apple accounts are allowed would be welcome, but I think that only works on iMessages since calls can be easily falsified. I’m looking forward to the day that Apple will know if a device is actually originating the call and pass that info to me.

I trust Apple more than any other org to actually care about eliminating spam calls. Sad state of affairs.

Most of my iMessage spam seems to be from fly-by-night Apple accounts (often setup with @gmail.com and @outlook.com email addresses). It surprises me that Apple seems to make it really difficult to report these as spam accounts (it's like five taps in iMessages to even find the right profile page to do so) and at this point because I get so many of them I've gotten to just deleting the threads rather than reporting them as spam because it is too many steps to report and the spammers are just cycling through random email addresses anyway so you never see more than one message from the same "Apple account".

- require signatures/other things to prove which hostname the email came from

- do wide-scale analysis of senders/email contents to filter out spam

There are still issues (eg people typically will be more mad if they see spam emails than if unexpected legitimate emails get marked as spam because they won’t know if the latter is happening unless they frequently check their spam folder), and the popularity of some webmail systems means that it can be hard to tick all the boxes to not have your own legitimate emails binned. Similarly the ‘marked as spam’ signal is very strong so if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’.

It seems the phone system is still at the stage where they don’t know who phone calls are actually coming from (except somehow they manage to bill these people).

My Gmail SPAM folder is filled with a ton of stuff that isn't really spam. There are newsletters I probably signed up for at some point or at least downloaded a document/watched a webinar where getting periodic emails was part of the deal. Because, yes, rather than clicking the unsubscribe button which legitimate marketers will honor, a lot of people just hit report spam which at some point puts it into the spam bucket for everyone.

I bought an iPhone this time around because I wanted to play with lidar and because google defaulted hard on the "free picture storage" promise. There's a lot to like about the iPhone, but anti-spam is a glaring exception. Holy shit, I assumed that Apple would at least have made an effort, even if wasn't their core expertise and the result wasn't quite as good as google's, but it's like they didn't even try. Meanwhile google put this into production years ago and they have iterated and tuned it to the point that the spam problem is almost completely buttoned down.

Google is applying spam filtering. Essentially all the text messages I want come through. All the text messages I don't are a silent notification.

Pixel applies spam filtering on calls too. Few spam calls even make it through the spam filtering. When they do make it through, and you don't recognize the number, you can use Google Assistant to screen the call, which will provide a live transcription of what the caller is saying, all using a local on-device speech recognition system. If you want to pick up, you can do so. Otherwise, you just drop the call.

I especially like the feature to "screen" a call that looks like spam, the small number that get through to me. It almost always is spam and I've wasted some of their seconds. It's not much, but I now feel like a victor rather than helpless. :)

The ability to filter per se is quite bad. The calls it decides to screen itself pass through 100% i.e. it listens to an extended warranty call or 5 star hotel call and then rings through as if it's a legitimate call. It's worth noting that only a small fraction of calls go to screen automatically, most just ring and I have to press screen button myself.

But yeah, I do the same. All set to auto ignore, even though it means one or two necessary calls are missed (ex. my cc company wanted to inform me they were cancelling their partnership and thus closing all cards).

The newest one seems to be group FaceTime calls (to about 20 numbers) that hang up after a couple seconds. Not sure what the angle is there; makes me wonder if there's an associated iPhone 0-day. Or maybe just probing phone type.

Even if I know where the call is coming from, your experience shows it is still possible to mess up because you can't possibly account for all the kinds of weird phone systems people might be using.

But otherwise, I leave my phone on silent and have it set not to notify me about voicemails. My friends and family know how to reach me.

The good news I guess is that, while I'm sure people vary, spam phone calls and texts seem to have gone down quite a bit for me to the point where they're a very occasional annoyance.

The solution to me seems clear: use video/voip apps for everything and ditch the phone number. I don't know how to reach that critical mass. It feels like we should already be there with zoom and teams, but apparently not.

I switched my same phone with same phone number to another provider and I get all texts that I am hoping to get now and get literally no spam texts.

I’ve been using Hey for two years now, and while it solved the spam problem, the UIUX makes it just so hard to use.

I’m keeping for one reason, it’s the shortest email I have.

I tested it for a while and liked it, but the price is too high for my low volume of personal email.