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.
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.
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
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.
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.
How about they just not send me unsolicited advertisements at all?
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
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.
The article says that "To send mail through ePostbox, companies pay about 2 kronor (19 cents) per item, some 25 percent less than it would cost to have the mail delivered by carriers."
Since they are paying for it, it is different from the normal spam. They'll probably target an audience (and do a spell check!) before they send it off. I'd probably sign up if they were to send me a coupon for a free pint of Ben & Jerry's every month. Anyway, I'm just pointing out that these SHOULD be a higher quality spam that what we're used to.
There's no place like ~/