Reality Check

Defusing Mail Bombs:

How to Stop Spam in Your Mail

It’s annoying. It’s obnoxious. It’s a waste of our time and energy. It’s Junk Mail and it’s time to fight back.

In out society, we are constantly bombarded with advertising. We see advertising on billboards, on TV, online, in the newspaper, in theatres, in restaurants, and even on cars and people. Strangers pass out pamphlets on street corners, which is another way of saying “Here, throw this away for me”. The most obnoxious and aggravating forms of advertising seek you out and invade your home. I’m talking about mail spam.

We all have to check our mailbox frequently to get our bills and avoid incurring huge late fees. Some of us even still get the occasional greeting card or movie in the mail. Your mailbox is like a treasure chest that fills up every day… full of garbage. I would say nearly 90% of my incoming mail is junk mail. If I ever want ANOTHER credit card, time share, or new car that looks as ugly as sin, this could be great stuff. But in the thousands and thousands of pages of junk mail I have gone through, I have never once found a piece of junk mail the slightest bit useful to me as anything other than fire kindling.

It’s terribly annoying and it just keeps piling up. Unlike with email you can’t just change your address and dodge any future spam, so what do you do to stop it? I say we fight back. Fight spam with spam. All our mail has to be stamped for one trip to us, and have a return address in case of problems with delivery. Once it goes through the system, it is postmarked to show that it has been sent and the stamp is no longer good. When spam gets to my mailbox, I put it right back in my outgoing mailbox. It gets picked up with the rest of the mail and sorted back into the mail system. When they see that it has been postmarked and can’t be mailed again, they return to sender. It goes right back where it came from. Any company not wanting to waste money (any reasonable company) will assume there is a problem with the address and scratch you off their mailing list. If nothing else, you send them back the same aggravation that they sent you. At the very least, it saves a trip to the garbage can. I have been doing this for about four months and I have already noticed a huge decrease in my spam. Last night, rather than finding a pile of junk mail like I used to receive, I had nothing but the one bill I actually needed to pay. If enough people were to do this, that annoying form of advertising would stop being profitable and eventually perhaps cease to exist altogether.