[cuttooth]

Why is this a thing? Are people so lazy to go through their own mail that they need to spend money to have someone else do it for them? Even if you factor in far-off edge cases, there is little to no money to made here except for the most insane of people who are almost never at their home address, and that number isn't all that large.

[tptacek]

Speaking for a family of four in Chicago: the amount of crap mail we get is a constant chore, and we regularly miss important things amidst the piles of upsell offers from the banks that own our mortgage, or the dealership that sold us a car, or the store we mail-ordered a pan from once, &c.

I think you're wrong about the appeal of this service. I wish we had something like it here.

Also, "laziness"? What does that even mean? There's a finite number of minutes in every day. Make a case for why I should spend any of those minutes dealing with paper mail. How many other goods and services do you use that we could interrogate as a facilitator of "laziness"?

[timjahn]

Speaking for a family of three in Chicago, we get a lot of crap mail as well. Really, it's all we get.

But: a) my 3 year old has fun grabbing it out of the box and pretending it's from various people. b) it takes literally a few seconds to just throw it out.

Now, if we were getting so much junk mail that it was making us miss our actual, important mail, that'd be a problem.

But we don't get any actual, important mail. It's 99% junk.

Anywho. The Postal Service is going to disappear in my 3 year old's lifetime anyway.

[crazydoggers]

That's like saying, 'why is email spam filtering a thing, it only takes seconds to delete all my spam!'

Perhaps if you're young and single you may only get a couple of pieces of mail. Try having some kids, owning a house, etc, and you'll see the amount of crap that get's stuffed into your mailbox skyrocket. Then you've got to deal with shredding huge amounts of credit card and other offers, and trying to sift through piles of junk everyday just to see if there might be one important piece of mail out of the dozens.

I would rather the post office did this for me (i'm suprised they're still not riding around on ponies), but I would most certainly pay for this service if it were available here.

P.S. If you do the math, a median software developer salary is 90K, which is about $40 an hour. I could spend at least 10 minutes a day going through and shredding snail mail. That works out to 4 hours a month or $160 of your valuable time. $4.99 is definitely worth it.

[samatman]

Even better would be if the post office offered free large shipping envelopes to be stuffed with spam. Penalties for abusers of the postal systems could range from additional charges to rate-limited use (I think it would be an unconstitutional limitation of free speech to completely deny a party the use of the postal service).

[ef4]

I don't think it's a question of "lazy", because for me it's not about saving time. It's about reducing physical clutter.

There's the short-term clutter that forms when I let piles of mail kick around, waiting to be dealt with. If all of that was digital instead, it wouldn't be cluttering up my environment. And I am demonstrably better at processing my digital inbox than my physical mail, because I can do it from any random waiting room or park bench.

And there's the long-term clutter of things that need to be filed away. I would much rather not spend the space. I have already experimented with scanning workflows, and none of them really hit the minimum convenience threshold for me yet.

I wish I could find a good automatic-feeding document scanner that works standalone (no PC), does OCR onboard, automatically handles rotation/sizing/two-sidedness, and pushes the resulting PDFs to the network drive or cloud of your choice. If it exists in a consumer-size device, I haven't found it.

[caw]

I can somewhat think of this for people with a lot of real estate. You don't necessarily want your bills and stuff sent to the rental house, and if you have a lot of properties it might be better to aggregate rather than to send them all to your permanent residence.