Ananda Kammampati's Blog
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20050712 Tuesday July 12, 2005

Crazy idea

It's hightime for a payback

Guess Iam not alone with the pain of dealing everyday with unwanted (postal) junk mails in the mailbox.

I had been thinking about how to deal with these and I was wondering what happens if we do this :

Most of the junk mails that we receive (preapproved credit cards, advts, etc) will have a return envelop with the return postage taken care of.

So instead of trashing those mails, spend a few more minutes in putting all their junk inside their own return envelop and send them back. Now let them deal with their own junk for a change!

Just think what happens if everybody does that :

Whichever Organization sends us, have to open/scan/process/deal with the envelops that we send back because some of them could actually bring them legitimate business. Right now their life is very easy because they send a million envelops out everyday and whatever they get back is, getting business.

If everyone does what I suggest, then I think they'll get the message what we are trying to say :-)

( Jul 12 2005, 10:30:00 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [4]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/ananda/entry/crazy_idea
Comments:

Seems a bit unlikely to work... most legitimate companies don't send spam (it's illegal to do so in many countries now, at least with out a clear way of unsubscribing from it). All the crap I get is from phishers and XXX websites, and there's nowhere to send those back to...

Posted by 213.202.151.223 on July 12, 2005 at 04:06 PM PDT #

There's another fun aspect to this. Since most of the adresses used for these types of mailings (at least here in old europe) are rented out from brokers and paid for on a per return mail basis, this would actually cause a much greater financial loss for the company than the processing alone (which is mostly done automatically anyway and really dirt cheap).

Posted by Olaf Mersmann on July 12, 2005 at 05:18 PM PDT #

That is a very good idea and infact that is implemented recently by a company to fight email spammers. Check this out.

Posted by Amjith on July 19, 2005 at 08:25 PM PDT #

i'd suggest that you tape the return envelope to a brick after you stuff it with the junk contents. Makes it more costly to the sender, and my postman gets a kick out of it (he CAN take a joke)...

Posted by just visiting on February 01, 2007 at 09:41 AM PST #

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