Slashdot Mirror
Trade in your Junk Mail for Spam
QueueEhGuy writes "CNN is reporting that the Swedish Postal Service, Posten, is now offering a service where customers can choose to receive spam via a free, government run, service. Business are given the option of using this at a 25% discount from carrier delivered mail. For those of us with physical addresses, it raises an interesting question as to which one is less annoying, environmental benefits aside." Interesting step
towards charging postage for email.
bet this will be a popular service
Posten
it's in my head
:0: /dev/null
* ^From:.*sweden.gov
The AC sexual powers are too strong for teh cunt.
I check my regular mail once a day, in the evening. I grab it all out of the box, quickly go through it discarding the junk, and I'm done.
Email on the other hand... it arrives all day long. And everytime it does, my computer makes a little noise. I get excited! I have new mail! So, I click over to check it, and everytime it's junk mail, I am saddened, and the new mail happiness dies off a bit more.
Oh, and there's also the fact that since regular junk mail requires the sender to pay real money to send it, it tends to be of a slightly higher quality.
I'd setup a hotmail account for it. :)
vipers_crap_mail@hotmail.com
The article doesn't say how to opt out. It says that the recipients can choose which companies' mail they'll accept.
Could you sign up for spam delivery and not accept from any company? That would be a useful govt. service.
Just give them a fake email adress... problem solved, no more spam! Or you could always give them your buddy's email addy...
Just because I AM paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get me.
to: spam.magnet@ahole.net
Dear Citizen,
I am writing this in order to have your opinion.......
---snip---
Don't read this!
If I choose to receive only spam, will my physical email box be free of physical bulkmail, then?
If so, that's a cool idea.
If not, where's the benefit?
I can't tell which is the case, as I do not read Swedish, and the link is just to the main page (this is what would happen in a world where "deep linking" is disallowed! Total contextual disconnection.)
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
It's easier to have an email spam filter. Actually fast to automate that then try to write a program that automaticaly scan incoming (physical) mail, and determin wether it's junk or not.
--=.=-- www.cyber2000.qc.ca
With email spam you have the option of using filters, for on thing. Clicking "delete" as soon as you see something is also an option that, while annoying, isn't *that* difficult.
Junk mail on the other hand must be physically dealt with - thrown in the recycling bin or garbage.
I think people get mmore annoyed with spam because it's a constant deluge, as opposed to regaular mail which most check just once a day. Still, spam is easier to deal with.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
mmmm
Do they throw in bread and mustard in with the deal?
It lets me know when my postwoman has arrived.
Junk email, on the other hand, merely lets me know when my mail server has crashed, which is much less often.
They could just save time and declare bankruptcy now. I read that article this morning.
Honestly, how do they expect people to react to this? "I can get spam from the government? Yippee!"
all you need is a "no junk mail" or "no flyers" sing on your front door and it cuts it down 90% at least.. if they still deliver it, you can call up and complain, yell at the 10 year old kid who's delivering it.
NOT. If you've got e-mail how often do you send letters in the real mail. I guess a business would send more than a home user. If this discout applied to packages and international mailings that would be better. Even better than that "my e-mail address is joeshmoe@hotmail.com, send me spam and give me a discount". Sounds like a good deal to me. I do nothing, you spam some crappy e-mail box, and I get cheaper mail, when I use it once a month to pay my two bills.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
This is great! Let junk pile up in the ePostbox, get a real e-mail account and use that instead, and never get paper junk mail again! Finally, a use for spam!
2002-07-02 22:22:05 US price for stamps goes up, Sweden goes digital (askslashdot,news) (rejected)
And waste the spammers money!
Better setup my kmail filters too!
I have never received a single spam e-mail for a legitimate product - not one - it's all about herbs, life-insurance, penis enlargement, crap like that. On the other hand the paper junk mail I get are from the local stores and are full of relevant offers.
I bet the difference is that the cost of paper junk mail is high enough, that you cannot market pure junk and earn enough on the fools.
Why would any consumer CHOOSE to have spam delivered to them? Wouldn't 99.99% just say "No thanks, I'd rather not subscribe to your spam service."?
Regards, Guspaz.
It costs me 4 cents a meg to receive spam.
It costs the spammer 5 to 70 cents to send me junk mail.
Unfortunately, I can't spamassassin my (non-E) mailbox.
S
Now if they offered some kind of sanction against the spammer. Say a few cents for every physical letter that was delivered when it should have gone as e-mail.
THAT might give some encouragement to register.
As it stands registration just gives the spammer another chance to find you.
If a company wanted to use junk email, they would send junk email for nearly free.
I only see the headers of my virtual junk mail, real junk mail sits in my trash can for a while, while I stare at it. The time of my staring at the flyer is worth much more to a company than the quarter second of visibility in my inbox, and that's why they pay for real mail.
Also when the postal service's IP hits the blacklist, it's all over.
-twb
Does some of the "postage" they're charging go to compensate ISPs for the increased network and server load? When the junkmail is on paper at least the postal service gets paid to carry it end to end rather than relying on other people's resources.
Since the advent of spam email, I've been receiving less junk mail at home.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Rather witty.
Apparently it seems to be a service for official documents and pay information to get sent via a web interface as well as physically.
Kind of cool, although I imagine it's only open to registered senders for security reasons.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Sign up for that. Have all of their email go to spambox@yourdomain.blah, and forward all mail sent to that address, to either vipul's razor, or to /dev/null. Now *both* of your boxes are free of spam. :-)
For a bunch of reasons, I find junk mail far more enjoyable then spam.
1. Junk mail costs the sender totally, I don't spend a cent. While spam costs me download time, bandwidth, and a bunch more.
2. Junk mail is tactile. When it's good, it's nice to read through a brochure or flyer. when it's bad, it's nice to feel and hear the sound of it hit the recycling bin. E-mail is just annoying all around.
3. I enjoy receiving junk mail, it means someone actually is willing to spend money to reach me. I hate receiving spam, it means someone has stolen my e-mail from somewhere and is charging me for their advertising.
4. Junk mail comes with coupons which are sometimes useful. At the very most, you'll have to print out the coupons received through e-mail, or only buy through online sites.
5. Junk mail arrives once a day at a set time. Not every 5 minutes annoying me endlessly at work while I am waiting for slightly more important e-mails.
So naturally given the option, you can see why I would prefer Junk mail via post over spam e-mail. E-mail should be reserved for correspondances and important communications that need to be received and responded to quickly. Snail mail can be used for the rest of the junk. (Plus, with all of the virii out there I get enough crap without needing to worry about junk mail.
~ kjrose
How about they just not send me unsolicited advertisements at all?
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
"US price for stamps goes up"
Time to privatize the post office. As the price goes up, the service gets worse and worse. We need someone brave enough to bust the postal workers' union and send prices spiraling down again.
I, personally, would happily take spam over real, physical junk mail any day. Every day I go to the mail box, checking for bills and the occasional real letter. Almost all I ever receive are junk mail, credit card offers, and crappy ad-funded local newspapers. I'd imagine that I fill a kitchen sized garbage can once a month with junkmail. That's a LOT. Imagine if your whole neighborhood received that much? Your county? Your state? What a waste of paper...
Give me spam any day. At least I can write filters to eliminate most of it, costing only a few bits. At least I'm not destroying trees, filling up landfills, and spewing chemicals all over.
-Steve
PS: You can cut down on some junkmail by calling 1-888-567-8688 to opt out of preapproved credit card offers. It won't get rid of all of them, but it'll cut down on those twice-daily offers of high interest plastic.
I just got an e-mail last night from a spammer that's getting blocked by our little BSD postfix box. The very politely asked us to check on our server to make sure they weren't inadvertantly being marked as spammers.
They went on to explain how they were only an opt-in service and proceeded to list all the mail servers from which they send spam from.
I'll admit it was a nice gesture. It was especially nice of them to give us a complete list since we only had a couple of their boxes in the black list.
1. Customers opt-in to get spam (in which case, it's not spam now).
2. Merchants pay more than the ISP connection for the service
3. The goverment controls delivery, and gets money for it.
I'd say the US Postal Service should take Sweden's lead!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Well, who needs Carnivore in such an environment? The government can look at whatever records are sent to you. Phone bills, credit cards. Great privacy.
I can delete it with the touch of a button...no trip to the recycling bin, no wad of junk paper that had to be hand delivered to my house. Like it or not, it could lead to a more efficient postal system (at least here in US), by getting alot of the junk out of carriers hands, thus making it possible to perhaps receive snail mail every other day, and maybe allowing the postal service to halve the number of employed carriers. This would result in a trimmer operation, saving money, lowering postal rates, cleaning the air and water and allowing us to leave our doors unlocked at night. Oh wait, the government runs the post office....never mind! :)
The above is only 50% sarcasm!
There is a major benefit to this approach that was not mentioned: Once the Swedish post office starts making that 19 cents per piece of spam, the Swedish government will look twice at all the spammers who are sending UCE directly without paying. While I certainly wouldn't want the government to stick it's nose so far into e-mail that any e-mail was taxed (and I expect this would be the final result), this should lead to some serious anti-spam laws with teeth in them. If done here in the U.S., and followed up with anti-(direct)-spam laws and serious enforcement, I'm certain it would significantly decrease the amount of spam sent to me each day.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
if we all go back to smoke signals, we wouldn't have these sorts of things, it's great communication for disasters, they can't hound you with advertisements....and most of all, we can use spam to fuel it, not just the spam mail, but burning the people behind the spam alive...yes, a nice fiery inferno, and we could dance around it and celebrate...do you think IPoSS will work (internet protocol over smoke signal) with a non-return to zero encoding scheme?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
The service maps physical adresses to email-adresses. So far so good.
Opt-out ability.. Good.
Free.. Good.
Bills in electronic form.. Great!
If one is not signed up for the service the junkmail goes out in paper form.. Good for the advertisers..
The only request I would have would be to be able to link the system to internet banking and some money management/budget program like Xor Compact.
Easy to keep track of expenditure in an easy way.. Specially good for people working and living in one country and still paying bills in Sweden.
Wish I had this service when I was contracting abroad.. not having to have family pick up bills and stuff.
I can't help but think that if I were a bulk mailer, and this caught on, it would make physical mailing much more valuable to me. A person would be more likely to look at the junk I send them, if there were less of it in their box. Real bulkmailers are likely to catch on to this pretty quick. It might have an effect not unlike wehat happens when everyone decides to take a shortcut to beat the traffic.
Also, think about the tactics used to make junk mail look official. That goes out the window with eMail.
It would be nice to save paper, though. Then again, one thing I like to do is to mail back the business reply envelopes empty.
SpamBouncer is the best weapon against spam!
VKh
Meatspace is for stupid people.
I remember in the good ol' uu-net days when you were charged per e-mail and news posting. The concept of spamming was a theoretical concept because who would be willing to pay for sending out all those e-mails?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Did anybody else realize how great this could be? Sign up for this service with a junk mail account (I have 2) and let it flow. This keeps your physical mail box clean, and you can check the legit SPAM whenever you want. There have to be drawbacks! Are there?
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
The mail carriers are an understanding lot, at least here in Canada, it seems. :)
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
... there's STILL a postal service?
NEW SPAM now with "Mechanically seperated Snail" I can see it now, soon we may all join or sweedish buddies. The government does this? isn't this some sort of cruel and unusual punishment?
It's all good.
How about just making it illegal to send junk mail, spam, and telemarketing except to those who opt in? This is a democracy (in US) after all, seems like >50% of the people would be for this.
Great, another instance in which a government outlaws something, only to turn around and offer the service under a "regulated" scheme for their own profit.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Sign up for spam@domain.com then redirect it all to /dev/null... or forward it to a friend! Fun times.
From what I read in the article this service would be primarily used to deal with bulk mailing of stuff the user would actually want, like government forms (housing cited in the article) and banking documents. As this is a pure opt in service, it seems unlikely people will opt for mailings from busineesses they are not interested in. This kind of shift is represented here with things like efiling and online banking.
I like this idea for a number of reasons. First of all, people need to realize that the type of spam they'd be getting would be nowhere near the types of "illegal" spam. I don't ever recall getting penis enlargement ads or "hot teen spring beach" ads in my physical mailbox. Secondly, who's to say that you don't just give them an email address aliased to /dev/null? You'd then be killing 2 birds with one stone. =)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Ok, the reason this might work in Sweden is that the postal service has credibility, that people in Sweden care more about the environment (paper mills smell like hell) than other peoples money and that the postal service has all the address records anyway, kind of like social services in the US so there is no real privacy threat other than there already is.
The reason this won't work is that if you stick a note with "no advertising" on your mailbox you don't get any junk mail (direct advertising at least), plus you can collect the junk mail over time and stuff it in any office of the company that sent it for them to recycle.
Mailers should be able to tell that I've done this, just as they can now run address files through the USPS and get forwarding addresses substituted and old addresses deleted. That would be an opt-out list with teeth.
Oh yeah, I'd *jump* at the chance to sign up it something similar appeared in the US.
Imagine the convenience of only having to block *one* spam site, something like "spam.usps.gov"... Ahh, gives me a warm and tingly feeling just thinking of the possibility.
"INGEN REKLAM TACK"
Thats all you need to stick on your post box or door. You dont get crapmail then. Except kommun (community stuff and real letters etc).
Simple. Works. Nay problemo.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Now the problem. In the US junk mail probably justifies and pays for a large part of the U.S. postal service. If we went to such a plan we would lose something, at least we would not have six day a week mail delivery. We might even have to pay more to mail a letter, which might not be so important as people are mailing less letters. On the other hand, we might some commercial demand for subsidized internet, for example, wider broadband.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
How would this prevent a spammer from continue to spam? To get the 25% discount? Ridiculous!
I am posting this without any bonuses because I freely acknowledge that it is wildly off-topic.
/. is not one of them. Moreover, the rather underhanded means of calling attention to his view puts other users in an uncomfortable position. Should moderaters mod Troed down? The sig is certainly off topic, even if the post is not. Should those who disagree with him post responses, even though they contribute nothing to the discussion at hand, and set themselves up to be modded down for being offtopic?
Nevertheless, it is no more so, and no more inappropriate, than the signature above. A look at Troed's journal provides no means to publicly respond to him, as the discussions are archived. He has not even provided an email address. I regard these circumstances as calling into serious question his contention that he is interested in the free exchange of ideas. Rather, it seems he is attempting to sneak his message in whenever he can, no matter how irrelevant it may be.
I do not question Troed's right to post anything he wants in his sig. I do question his discretion. This topic has nothing to do with the Middle East, so his objective is simply to goad. I need not list the places around the web available for informed and lively debate about the Middle East.
The tactic is clever, I'll give it that. I do care, Troed, and my eyes are open, not only to Palestinian terror, but also to your bullying. I urge you to reconsider your sig, and take the discussion to your journal. Otherwise, though it is not an ideal solution, I may add myself to those who mod your down on sight.
Please don't compound your inconsideration, or mine, by carrying this discussion further. Post to your journal, or send me an email.
-db
you suck, and calm down. It's a f ucking sig.
I can take it down the street and dump it in the mail box on the corner. If it's crap from some list I'm on I write "RETURN TO SENDER" on it first.
You want to litter in my mail box? Well I can litter in yours.
I wish everyone would do this. I wonder how long it would take them to get the message if half the mail they had to sort through was just trash.
a3c6 0e89 b1ec aa4d d630 26c8 d07e 7eed 8148 5503 02b4 dfaa 9922 b28d 0820 c4af
This should be a wholly subsidised by the advertisers.
Why should anyone pay to download spam out of their own pocket ?. The advertisers are getting a clean optin list without doing anything other than registering with the post office. So instead of being a hit or miss situation they get a fully vetted list of inetrested parties. This is a valueadd proposition for them.
But I don't see any advantage for the users unless the Postal service subsidises teh access or bandwidth.
Want to cut down on your physical junk mail? Try this site: http://www.usps.com/websites/depart/inspect/fraud/ GetOffMailingLists.htm. Also offers removal from phone and e-mail lists too. See page for specific details.
SIG: HUP
So now I will need to take my laptop with wireless card into the bathroom, so I can read the 'Sears' Catalog on the crapper.
grip
Failure is not an option. It comes automatically enabled in every Microsoft product.
How many trees/day are wasted on junk mail?
The difference between softspam (e-spam) and hardspam (snail-spam) is expense to the spammer. A typical piece of hardspam probably costs the company $0.50 in material costs, assembly costs, and postage. This expense needs to be justified which causes them to self regulate their spamming, to some extent. Softspamming is nearly free by comparison. They get the biggest list they can and one guy sits down to write one email and off it goes--annoying hundreds of thousands. The softspammer has little motivation to justify his list. If 90% of the addresses are bad, it's still a good list because 10% of them are good. Hardspammer need to worry more about keeping their lists up and focusing their spam on people more likely to respond.
When I receive hardspam, I know that the sender at least had to pay for me to receive it. With softspam, that isn't the case because 1's and 0's are free. I know they still had to pay for bandwidth which adds up, but compared to hardspamming expenses it's nearly free.
char *mySig;
This is a great idea. Dear Postal Service: Please stop sending junk mail to my mailbox and instead send email to my emailbox. My email address is null@nowhere.nodomain. Thanks!
Do they plan to send part of the proceeds from each spam to the ISP who receives it, and/or the direct recipient of the mail should they be paying by the byte (like myself)?
If not, I'd consider this a fraudulent way of making money.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
And buy our postages stamps to do it! You don't actually think that will work, do you?
Bwwhaaahaaa!!
Who the fuck cares what someone says in their sigs?
From what I can tell from the demo images and information on www.posten.se, the user have total control over which company/govt. agency can send email (or rather web-mail). And the user can even control how the mail should be delivered (webmail / paper) based on the type of letter (invoice/advertisment/catalogue etc).
When I saw the TV commercials for it my gut feeling "spam, take cover!" too. But now when I've read the information it looks promising indeed.
I believe the webmail address isn't available from the normal internet email system, but just registred companies with accounts can send mail.
Check out www.fpsonline.org.uk and sign up today!
This has to be the best way to save trees since eating beaver ;).
All things in moderation; including moderation
If you see the terms of my website, you will see one of the ways I want to take out spammers.
...here's the link to Canada's equivalent service, run by Canada Post, that's been around for almost 3 YEARS.
epost
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
The primary purpose for this service is to enable its users to receive, view, and pay their bills in a secure online environment from one trusted location. In addition, patrons of this service can subscribe and opt in to content offerings they are interested in receiving, such as online magazines, newsletters, and marketing offers for which they have expressed an interest.
Posten has paid a great deal of attention to preventing spam in its system by limiting access to mass mailing capabilities to only companies who have paid to participate. Once the companies have paid to participate, they can only send content to their current snail-mail customers or customers who subscribe through the service. Those customers must then enter a subscription key to begin receiving the content.
Canada Post is also offering a similar service using NETdelivery's technology, and it is being well received by its patrons.
Personally, I would be thrilled if the US Postal service would provide such an offering so I could receive and pay my bills online from the one trusted service provider. The only options that are currently available require me to have my bills snail mailed to the provider where they scan the bill (and really, who knows who has access to the paper version of the bill) and present it to me online. I'd also love it because I could eliminate all that paper that goes to the recycle bin, and even limit the information that I see by choosing not to subscribe to it.
Real easy question to answer for me. Even if your spam account is free, you're still the one paying for the computer to access it, the phone line to dial in from, the electricity your computer runs off of, etc. Junk mailers pay 100% of the delivery costs. Period. All push, no pull. Not even telemarketers do that.
"it raises an interesting question as to which one is less annoying, environmental benefits aside."
Hrm... biodegradable paper (often post-consumer recycled content) or computers running off of coal-fired plants? Decisions, decisions...
At least when i put up a sticker on the door the postman/carrier respects that and do not put crap into my door - that will never happen on internet.
Posten is just another (greedy) state run socialist bullshit monopoly which will die (like Telia) in a few years.
You could always disable sigs in your preferences. They're rarely pertinent anyway...
It not about spam at all.
It about companies sending information to
their customers with a special service.
It is not even e-mail!!
For example I can opt-in at my landlord
to get my rent bill in electronic form
through ePostBoxen at posten.se
And why is the Swedish goverment linked
instead of the postal service itself?
This is going downhill fast!
A number of comments seem to say what you're saying here: that email is more intrusive because it arrives throughout the day. I don't get it. What's keeping you from only checking it once a day? Just turn off the "you have new mail" thing and check email when you feel like it.
Anything can be an excuse for raising prices. The Dutch phone company once used "We have to double the local rates because the average length of a call is 2 minutes". It didn't seem to bother anyone (except geeks) that there was no logical connection between those statements.
There's a large number of ways to defeat PGP that don't involve brute-forcing RSA or IDEA at all. Your "make it simple" actually makes it way more difficult.
The easiest way to defeat PGP wholesale is probably to create a worm that publishes secret key files, the way SirCam did with Word documents. For extra credit, encrypt the keys before sending them out, and publish them on alt.flame :-)
Of course, deploying the worm means finding and exploiting a security hole in a well-known service. And we know those have all been fixed by now. Certainly no government site would run with a vulnerable web server, for example.
Too bad we can't opt-in for something like that in the 'States. Then we can just all create one email account that moves everything to /dev/null and get a discount on our postage.
My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
How about just providing an email account that gets trashed to /dev/null everyday ?
You could get antharax by junk mail.
yea, gee, gotta little carried away there (WRONG STORY!). Thanks for the mod(s) down, you trolls. It was an honest mistake.
Like you never make mistakes.
-prisen