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Comment by smokeydoe | Hacker News Reader

Fuck the USPS for allowing advertisers to bulk send junk mail to everyone for a couple dollars. It’s a daily chore to take out the mailbox trash before it’s so full they start returning important letters back to sender for not being able to fit it in.

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maybe you should instead fuck your legislators so they can make that practice illegal (getting adverts per mail without consent). Where I live it's opt out, so not ideal either but at least I don't have to put up with the trash after adding a sticker to my post box.

You clearly haven't seen my legislators.

Why not both? USPS is most prolific and polluting spam purveyor in the world.

Yeah one of the biggest (if not the biggest) sources of paper that I throw away is junk mail. I throw away bags of it every month, 98% of it unopened. The environmental impact of the paper, the printing, the fuel burned to deliver it, must dwarf the impact of the single-use plastic bags I get at the supermarket.

They get to send each house 30 lbs of crap per year at tremendous discount, but if you want to send a Christmas card to Grandma, you have to pay full price.

That's not true at all. It's class mail is delivered at extreme discount, subsidized by spam.

I wish they would ban mixed media envelopes. So sick of ripping off the plastic windows on junk mail so I can recycle it, it's a such a waste of time and resources.

because you don't shoot the messenger... I don't think it should be the task of the mail delivery service to decide what you should receive

Sadly USPS is frequently the perpetrator.

https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm

I’ve tried every opt-out I can find and it still doesn’t stop.

It's been 20 years now, but I tried opting out of a prolific grocery coupon mass mailer. But the carrier was so used to everyone getting them that I just got the ones addressed to my neighbor.

What I despise is the old marketing materials that portrayed the letter carriers as American heroes because they deliver stuff. Yet the vast majority of what they deliver is ads.

I was going to say that you could do it for free, like I did years ago. But now it requires a payment of $5 to opt out of receiving junk mail.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail says it's free to stop getting mail for dead people. I was executor for my mom and aunt in 2017 and still get mail for them both. Turns out it's now $1 to stop that. https://www.ims-dm.com/cgi/ddnc.php Screw you Hillsdale College.

You know you can fill out one form and 90% of it will stop?

What’s the form? Never heard of it before

Five U. S. dollars:

https://www.dmachoice.org

I've done it, and in a matter of weeks the junk just disappears for the most part. Lasts ten years, and I think we're about due for a re-up at our house, as the junk is leaking back in.

> It’s a daily chore to take out the mailbox trash

Return it to the sender.

That's incredibly expensive. Bulk mail can't be returned for free.

> Bulk mail can't be returned for free

True. It’s surprisingly effective, though. Another route is to fish around for their return envelope and send them a pretty leaf or whatnot, but that could just spur them into paying more attention to you.

I used to gather up the credit card application forms for Brand A and mail them to Brand B in their prepaid envelope. I did so many times that Citi finally send me an intimidating letter from their fraud department asking me to stop. I didn't, of course, but they eventually phased out the prepaid envelopes altogether.

Oh, I'm doing that. I previously confined myself to leaves, cat treats and bar-napkin drawings.

I write "return to sender" on the envelope and drop it into a post box. It doesn't cost anything.

> I write "return to sender" on the envelope and drop it into a post box. It doesn't cost anything

This technically only works for first-class mail. Bulk mail doesn’t have return services.

Yep, as a last resort I tried doing this with an apparently unstoppable catalog and got about a month before the postal worker scrawled a nastygram back on one threatening delivery embargo.

> threatening delivery embargo

...win-win?

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