[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).