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.
Posten
it's in my head
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 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!"
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!
Except you can't heat your home with email. =]
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.
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
My parent's house has a woodstove and paper junk mail was a good means of lowering heating costs.
Lets see spam do that.
I take it you're not using an Athlon! ;-)
Don't read this!
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
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!
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.
Remember that bulk mail (aka junk mail) subsidizes postage in the US (recent postage increases notwithstanding).
If they go to "spam", then postage goes up even more.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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";
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.
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
The mail carriers are an understanding lot, at least here in Canada, it seems. :)
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
My parent's house has a woodstove and paper junk mail was a good means of lowering heating costs.
Lets see spam do that.
Easy, print it out! =)
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
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
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
According to the summary (always an iffy proposition), businesses would get to send you their e-spam at a per piece cost of 3/4 of their snail-spam rates. I would hazard a rough guess that the overall total the post office would get would be roughly the same (no numbers as proof, just a hunch).
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Uh, we already did that. At least the post office is not supported by tax dollars anymore.
As the price goes up, the service gets worse and worse.
What exactly is your complaint about the Postal Service? I send a letter and it gets just about anywhere in the country in 2-3 days. Can deposit mail in my own mailbox for pickup or in any of thousands of convenient locations around the country. For 37 cents? What's your complaint??
My only complaint is when they do price increases, they should increase to an even 5-cent amount (i.e., 30 cents to 35 cents to 40... None of this 37 cent BS that's just annoying).
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!
No, but my P4 can brew a nice cup of tea =]
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
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...