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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

I'm my HOA president right now and something that infuriated me is a Texas law stating we have to notify all residents of actions by mail. Nobody reads their mail and nobody should. We're a block of 6 townhouses and my farthest neighbor is 40 feet away. I see these people everyday and can just tell them, yet we're forced to send out a bunch of useless mail destined to be thrown away. We first noticed this when we saw a category of charge from the property manager related to mail. None of us want mail, but the state of Texas forces us to receive it anyway. They also sell contact info to marketers when you apply for a driver's license, so ever since they passed the law saying you can't vote with an out of state ID, that increased my spam levels, too.

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HOA actions seem like exactly the sort of thing I should be receiving by mail. I think this thread is referring to not wanting things like "To {YOUR_NAME} or Current Resident" or spam offers via mail, which are a waste.

Right. I'm sure most of would agree that we don't want to normalize robocall phone calls for anything that isn't really immediate and urgent. And failing that, email isn't necessarily reliable (spam filters/changes/getting lost in all the clutter), which pretty much leaves physical mail. So, yes, even if most people will just throw it in the trash I do want to receive notification of town meetings and other official actions that affect me by mail. I certainly also wouldn't want to normalize posting something on Next Door or Facebook to be a sufficient alternative.

I vividly remember the time my apartment complex scheduled a fire inspection and chose to forego the written notification required by California law, instead replacing it with an email. Too bad their property management dashboard was incapable of sending me email. I got a notification during a meeting with video showing people breaking into my unit. The police (just around the corner!) showed up before I could get home. It was a mess.

Don't rely on email for important things.

Former attorney here - if you ever end up in some kind of dispute, you will be glad you notified people in writing!

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

So how in general should people be notified of official actions/activities? Just hope they find out somehow? It's not like most people read some local newspaper any longer.

Email.

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.

I don't consider email a reliable/robust official notification mechanism. People have various emails, may or may not check a given email address, stuff gets filtered to spam, etc. It's almost certainly more trustworthy than it was a number of years back but if you want to send me an important notification, I want it to be first class mail.

The reliability of postal mail is circular. I only bother to check my physical mailbox because it's used for official notices, like ballots, jury summons, and tickets. If I could direct those to email, I'd lose the key and not regret it for a moment.

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