USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons

Re:USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons by JoshTriplett on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:02PM (#50432076)

> Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.

If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.

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Re:USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons by kulahan on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:03PM (#50432106)

Bipartisan effort concentrated across many years to destroy one of the most useful services in the nation.

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Re:USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons by ExoticPearTree on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:50AM (#50436913)

It is not for the USPS to decide which mail gets delivered or not. They get paid to deliver mail, and they deliver it. This is a wild take on “the postal service should now do anti-spam”.

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Re:USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons by JoshTriplett on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @05:02AM (#50438161)

It is absolutely the job of the USPS to be a public service. Many countries' postal services have the concept of letting individual recipients opt out of bulk mail; for instance, in the Netherlands, you can put a "NEE" sticker on your mailbox. Or, better yet, entirely discontinue the specifically designed bulk mail programs that exist to deliver postal spam.

I'm not suggesting the USPS should be filtering by content, just taking the programs that exist specifically to facilitate postal spam and consigning them to the dustbin of history. Those programs essentially exist because they're a primary funding source for USPS.

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