There's a new feature they just rolled out that emails you images of the mail whenever it comes. Just as little security. You can spy on someone's mail indefinitely and they'd be none the wiser.
My favorite part of this feature is that I now get to see images of junk mail before it is delivered to my mailbox. Too bad the USPS is so serious about maintaining their leadership as the 'leading deliverer of junk mail' to offer a way for recipients to reject it since they can literally see it in transit.
If you could reject junk mail, junk mail senders wouldn't pay to, well, send it. And the USPS would lose a lot of money.
Imagine how terrible GMail's spam filters would be if spammers paid Google for delivery... Oh wait, Google literally has a dedicated tab for that! For those that find it useful (and I don't doubt it is), imagine what the alternative would be for the spammers, you'd be 100% ignoring it by unsubscribing or filtering it as spam. Now that it's corralled off, you can look at it at your leisure, and Google can keep advertisers happy by offering them a non-zero chance you'll look at their spam.
But promotions is something completely different from spam. Almost every single email you get there, you subscribed to or didn't opt-out of. And if you don't have an unsubscribe linkk in those emails, you can still create a manual filter to auto-delete them. And those senders don't pay Google to end up in promotions anyway.
It does seem really weird that somehow a business relationship between spam companies and the United States postal service means that I have to be responsible for recycling a bunch of garbage.
Once it's in my mailbox, what can I do, drop it on the ground? That's littering and a crime. Leave it in my mailbox? I tried that and the mailman eventually stuck a Post-It note on my box saying I wasn't allowed to do that.
So I'm in some sort of weird uncontracted relationship wherein I must ferry a bunch of paper from my box to the recycling bin.
I used to do that until the mailman decided I didn't live here anymore...twice.
Now I apparently don't have a mailing address though the only bill I could never successfully get converted to all electronic (not from lack of trying) is the power company which messes them up every so often getting their bills returned every month.
Check out Traveling Mailbox. Same basic idea as Earth-class mail, but cheaper and targeted more towards individuals rather than businesses. I'm not affiliated, but a satisfied customer.
On the whole, the service is brilliant, and exactly what USPS should have become in the mid-90s. Mail is auto-scanned and delivered as a pdf attachment to my email. When I need something physically forwarded to me, the prices are only a small markup from what it costs to mail the package, and it's mailed promptly. On the whole, it's awesome, and I'm very happy to be a customer.
I'll give you my two big complaints:
1) The time delay. My Traveling Mailbox address is in the western half of the US. Mail has to be delivered to that address, then shipped cross country to North Carolina where their headquarters and mail scanner is. You can count on an additional 3 to 14 days after USPS thinks the mail has been delivered before a scan of it shows up in my email inbox. A couple years ago, this was much worse and less consistent; occasionally letters were 3 weeks late. However in the past 2 years or so, I've noticed the time delay has been much more consistent, centering around 3-5 business days. They maintain addresses all over the country, and there's probably only the scale and margin to maintain one scanning facility, so I don't know what TM could realistically do to address this problem. If I didn't need an address where I have it, I would have already moved my address to Sanford, NC, where their headquarters is.
2) Some banks don't like the address. Due to KYC laws, banks and financial institutions need a residential address for their clients. I'm homeless and don't have such an address, so this is difficult for me. Traveling Mailbox is nice in that they give you a street address, not a P.O. Box. To a casual glance, it looks like a normal street address, but if one researches the address online, one will find that it's a business. When I changed my address over to use my TM address as my home address, about half the financial institutions I worked with rejected the address as not being my residence and said they couldn't do business with me anymore. Some asked for a driver's license as proof of the address. I said no problem and faxed my driver's license (which has my TM address), but the institutions still closed my account without further explanation. I'm still a little salty about the hubris of the politicians who enacted the KYC laws, assuming that everybody conforms and has a permanent residential address.
I wish that for a variety of online activities, I could set a maximum bandwidth available for ads and have advertisers bid for it, to keep my system running fast. And in turn, Google (or others) could price its services based on how much bandwidth users put out for bid.
Edit: It should be obvious that you could do this with physical mail too.
In order to maintain access to (currently) free services without making one's computer unusable.
The problem I see is that the processing and bandwidth used by advertising are currently "as much as advertisers can get away with" and I think it's leading to a tragedy of the commons.
But I see no need to eliminate ads and free services either. There just needs to be a cap enforced on the resources used.
Yep. I get e-mail every few days with pictures of the mail headed for the people who now live in an apartment in another city I haven't lived in for close to 10 years.
I've tried to get it fixed online, but so far no results.