Mail. . .. and Junk Mail

Mail is one of those classic and perennial subjects of conversation.  Like the weather, everyone has an opinion on the mail.  Usually the opinion is the same one that has seemingly always existed. . . that the mail is slow and everything in it is bad.  By and large, that's a pretty unfounded opinion but it doesn't seem to vary much over time.

A classic example of this is something once overheard by my son in the barber shop.  A couple of older gentlemen were in the barbershop waiting their turns and discussing the mail.  One complained that the German postal service could move a letter clear across Germany in a day and there was no reason that the US Postal Service should not be able to do something similar.

Well, the Post Office does do something similar to that every day.  Germany's geography consists of 137,847 square miles.  Wyoming's geography consists of 97,814 square miles.  Mailing a letter from one place in Wyoming to another, overnight, is not hard to do, and that's about the same mileage a typical German letter would put in.  This was probably all the more case in the complainers case as his time in Germany likely came before German reunification when the square mileage of the BDU was less than that of Wyoming.  The Unites States, as a whole, consists of 3,794,083 square miles, and obviously moving a letter from one place in the US overnight may be a much more difficult matter.

In other words, people, in part, like to complain about the mail.

Which is not to say that the mail hasn't changed over the years.  One thing I was recently surprised to learn is that in at least the UK twice daily mail delivery was the norm in the early part of the 20th Century and it was common to mail a card in the morning and have it delivered in the afternoon, an impressive feat.  This is the reason that there are so many photo cards from the early 20th Century.  Average people, and businesses, used them for short messages.  Sort of like having a fancy email signature, using a photo card was a little spiffier way of sending a message.  Photo cards were extremely common, and existed on all topics, including news, travel, and politics.  Even radical organizations had photo cards, designed not only to serve as messages for their adherents, but basically as advertisements for their causes.Of course, then as now, people also collected them to.  But probably the chance to get a photo card, which many of these were, added a bit of happy anticipation to receiving mail.

As twice daily mail delivery might infer, mail delivery was an extremely important governmental function at one time (and really still is).  Delivering the mail is one of the duties of the United States government that's specifically referenced in the U.S. Constitution, putting it up there with providing for the nation's defense.  Indeed, its one of the task that the US took on right from the onset.

Early postal delivery was a daunting tasks.  Now forgotten the Post Office was in effect one of the nations' early "mounted services", in that much mail was delivered by mounted men.  This was so much the case that it is claimed that the etymology of the equestrian term "posting" comes from postal riders.  Posting is the practice of "rising to the trot", as opposed to "sitting the trot" in which a rider rises to the beat of the trot, a practice which generally makes the trot easier for the rider to do and which also provides some relief for the horse.  Whether posting actually comes from postal riders is not undisputed, but it at least there's some basis to make that assertion.

Seal of the former United States Post Office Department, the predecessor to the United States Postal Service.

Moving the mail was so important to the country that being Post Master General was a cabinet level position in the US Government from 1872 to 1971, when the Department was converted into the Postal Service. Few people probably recall that change now, but it was a real one.  I'm actually pretty surprised to learn that the elevation to a full cabinet position came in 1872, however, as that would seem rather late.  Still, having said that, I suppose that delivering the mail in the vast West at that time must have been a chore of epic proportions.  It's a forgotten one too.  For example, an historical oddity is that one of the government installations near Independence Rock, during its 19th Century hay-day, was a post office.  People remember the forts and what not, but they don't remember the post office.

I suppose the importance of mail started to diminish slightly with the telegraph, and then the telephone, but not much really.  It's the Internet and Email that's really cut into the importance of the mail.  Not that mail isn't important, but it's declining in importance nearly every day.  Offices still send out vast quantities of mail, however, and the law in particular relies on the mail as many types of legal instruments and documents must be "served" by mail.  A ritual in any law office is the daily sorting, stamping, and delivering of the days' mail, followed by the daily mailing out of pleadings and notices. The law, however, is generally a slow adapter of new technologies.  Electronic communications are making their inroads here too now, and now Federal Courts use electronic filing, as system by which all pleadings in actions are filed electronically.  The Federal Pacer system also sends out the notice of filings as well, which replaces the requirement that lawyers mail out pleadings.  So far only the Wyoming Supreme Court has done something similar, with other Wyoming state courts retaining the mailing and hard copy requirements.  It's only a matter of time, however, before all state courts in the US use some variant of electronic filing.  I'd be very surprised if I was still filing hard copies of pleadings, and mailing the service copies, a decade from now.\

Of course, part of what everyone has received in the mail for many years is "junk".  "Junk mail" is the term loosely used for advertisements.  It should be regarded as pretty loose of term, however, as a lot of people are looking forward to some of that junk.  Catalogs and advertisements may be unwelcome to some, but many look forward to those very things, and cringe at the other major thing that the Postal Carrier delivers, that being bills.

Its interesting to note that junk mail is an unwelcome aspect of mail that Email not only managed to catch up with, but to really surpass the old written mail with.  On most days I get a few advertisements in my home mail, and I get a few every couple of days in my work mail, although quite frequently the work advertisement mail is relevant to what I'm doing and isn't really all junk by any means.  But my Email, particularly my work email, is amazingly full of junk mail.  And junk mail, as any Emailer knows, is derisively known as Spam, a name that the makers of the canned meat by that name are probably less than thrilled with.

The real Spam.

Spam, the electronic kind, is really irritating.  It's at least as irritating as junk mail ever was, and arguably its much more irritating.  Spammers bombard my work email with junk every day, and with repeated emails using the same bogus email addresses.  As a result, I've reset my Spam Filter on my email from Stun to Kill, and now most of it gets weeded out, thank goodness.  I hope for a day when Spam Filters will be so efficient that Spam will die off, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.  Indeed, I'd like the Spam filters to hunt the perpetrators down, leap out of their computer screens, and hurl cans of Spam at them.

Most irritating of all the Spam, and the one that seems to come into my work email the most frequently, are those that purport to somehow be business related, or which closely mimic real email that a person might receive. For example, I get fake Amazon spam fairly often.  I know when I've ordered something from Amazon, so I don't click on them, but it's irritating.  Likewise, for awhile I got piles of them purporting to be from the IRS, even though I know very well that the IRS does not send out official information by email.  Others mimic banks, or other business institutions.

Oddly, some of these purport to be from people at these institutions, which are the most bizarre of them all. Probably a very high percentage of these Spam emails originate overseas, and they contain either malicious viruses or some sort of nasty tracking program of some sort.  They're dangerous. But they're sort of amusing at the same time, as apparently the Spammers in Russia or Nigeria, or wherever, think the average American has a very unusual name.  Just the other day, for example, I got one that purported to be from ArmandRosenberg, or soemthing like that.  Armand?  Unusual names like that are common for these.  There will be things like SpankadorVonLudwig, or ZiangchwoSpencer.  Apparently Spammers spend a lot of time watching American television in which names are, indeed, sometimes odd.

Anyhow, it's extremely frustrating.  I almost miss the day when junk mail was limited to catalogs and mailings that I could just toss, rather than electronic Spam I have to filter out in vast quantities, some of which probably contain viruses and all of which I wish to avoid.  Even bloggers, such as we, have to worry about the occasional spam attempt as a comment to this and our other sites.  We love it when we get comments, but every few months there's one where some poster claims to love the site and wants to direct to his own time share in the Caribbean, or something, site. 

It was refreshing, therefore, when some I twice received mail from a local car franchise a couple of weeks ago that had hit upon the idea of sending out envelopes with no return address, and their add, with a sticky note attached addressed to a household member's first name.  It looked oddly personal, even though it was apparent it was not. Still, it came by mail, and it didn't contain a virus.