There is an advantage and a disadvantage living on the southern side of Gardeners Road. I live in Daceyville, where most of my neighbours are of the state housing commission. As I have suspected that it is the reason — I actually do not get many unsolicited commercial mails, i.e. spam. Compare to the Kingsford residents just across the road, their street-facing mailboxes are usually filled with supermarket catalogues and promotion flyers, whereas we have got none. It is either the spammer delivery boy got too lazy to cross the road, or they reckon the housing commission guys over there are not going to afford any shopping anyway.
Unfortunately some of these spams, most notably the Coles/Woolies/Franklins catalogues, are Vivian’s weekly reading material. How are we supposed to know what to buy, what is on sale, what is cheap, etc when we go to the supermarket, if we don’t have their spams in our hands? So Vivian had to explicitly asked Woolies to post their catalogue to us (yes, they do that kind of service), but that is another story.
So I am sort of used to having very few unsolicited commercial mail in my mailbox, until… I got myself a Post Office Box! I rented a PO Box in Kingsford a few weeks ago as I feel that it is safer to have your financial statements posted there. In some occasions I also do not wish to disclose my residential address so a PO Box is pretty handy. I went for the smallest one, and at $70 per year it is not too bad.
Upon signing up, there was an option whether I wish to receive unaddressed mail. How would a piece of mail with to TO: address landed in my PO Box, if it is not a spam put in there by an Australia Post staff? So I ticked on NO…
But apparently the spam filter at AustPost does not work!
Every morning when I go and pick up mails, there are always catalogues and flyers and pamphlets in my brand new PO Box. Some are trying to sell me mobile phones, or Dell computers, or other business necessities. Quite a few are actually explicitly targeting AustPost customers, as they spelt out their “Exclusive Offer to AustPost”. I am actually getting far more spams in my PO Box than my usual letter box — consider the only way to stuff a mail into a PO Box is from inside the Post Office!
So there we go. AustPost PO Box — it is a $70/year spam box. I read Sydney Morning Herald and Slashdot everyday, and advertisement kept those sites free. Why then am I still charged 70 bucks a year for receiving spams in my PO Box?
Oohh…I love catalogues too! They don’t deliver them at my parents place, so I used to have to get them from other nearby units. We don’t get very much at my place either, I suspect its because of the flight of stairs leading up to our mailboxes! I take them from other mailboxes during my (infrequent) walks :P
Our KFC/Burger King/Pizza Hut/Dominos vouchers always go missing… and we always receive letters/notes from real estate agents wanting to sell our house. How rude >:(
I agree with you about an AusPost box being a spam box; ours is. It also seems that the local pizza/Asian takeaway/fish ‘n chip shop think they are exempt from the no junk mail sticker on our street letter box. We too get a lot of “Dear homeowner” letters from the local real estate businesses. Geez if we wanted to sell we wouldn’t have bought the place! At least I do the right thing and put all the junk mail in the recycling bin.
Hey I have a PO Box too
It’s an an area that has a reputation for low % of English-as-a-first-language speakers, so I get about 5 spams a month
I agree with you though, you shouldn’t have to pay to receive spam like that.
Oh and @sniperbait, I have been told by letterbox marketers that you get better results from the nojunkmail boxes for some reason. And the same goes with door-to-door sales and the no salesman stickers.
@Jonk — the area I lived in are mostly Greeks and Indonesians but I am probably getting junk mails in my PO Box 3 days a week. AusPost probably just don’t want to miss out on any monetisation opportunity.
Wow… I have a PO box at the Kingsford post office as well!! However, I think i’m more lucky than you – i’ve had it for a couple of months now and have only received junk mail approximately 3 times!
I’ve registered for that service that sends me an email each time I have mail (and i only receive mail about once or twice a week). Imagine my fury if i got emails 3 days a week and visited the post office (15 mins walk each way or sometimes an infuriating time trying to find parking on gardeners road) just to find out it was junk!
good point in the original post – the boxes should be either free or very cheap, not only because they help aust post make money from the spams, but the boxes also greatly reduce the effort needed to delivery the letters! post offices with large number of boxes are probably cutting back on the postman hours saving a tonne of money on labour costs!
a very good idea just came to me about dealing with the aust-post-delivered spams – treat them with their own medicine! stuff all the junk mail straight into the nearest street post box. I bet the postman will find the junk mail extremely annoying!