I've been getting tons of physical mail I didn't ask for for years. We need a spam filter for the USPS. I only check my mailbox when I know something I want is coming, or if I need some grocery ads for kindling, because it's all garbage. It drives me insane how wasteful it is, chopping down trees just to make mailers that noone wants.

I literally gave up on having a mailbox because of physical mail spam. I realized that they don't deliver mass mail to business addresses, and so I took down my mailbox and now just have all my mail sent to my work address. I've been doing it for ten years now, and it works, but it does lead to weirdness occasionally.

  Most often I encounter people who actually get angry at me for not having a mailbox, call me selfish, call me the unibomber, tell me it is illegal.  I still cannot figure out why people get emotionally charged about it.

  A short while after I did it, the USPS reported to HUD that my address was vacant, and HUD reported that to the bank that holds my mortgage.  This of course freaked them out until I explained to them what was going on.
 
  I was also unable to take advantage of the free Covid test kits that the Federal government said were available to "every family in America". Turns out it was really every family in America with a residential mailbox.  Ok, that was my choice, but there *are* still rural communities that rely on general delivery at the post office rather than individual mailboxes.

  I do occasionally hit companies who's web app will tell me my address isn't good because it is a business address instead of a residential address.  They are few enough though that I can just not do business with them and it hasn't impacted me much.

It doesn't help with the spam but if you sign up with USPS's Informed Delivery, you can at least see if you're getting anything that day. Which can at least save you trips on collecting your mail until you receive something you care about.

What we really need is an email address like <my address>@usps.com and all physical mail that isn’t from a registered law firm or government institution to be rejected because I’ve “opted-in to electronic physical mail”. Emails to that address would be forwarded to the personal email addresses of household members based on the named recipient. And sending those emails should cost the same as a stamp.

Would help cut down on the massive amount of waste that is physical spam and help generate profit for the postal service

I don't think you can opt out of this kind of advertising, and it's important that people en masse don't, because it subsidizes the entire mail system.

I have a sheet of printed labels that say 'Return to sender, unsolicited mail' which I use for such instances.

I am of the belief that the offending business must then pay to receive it back. Not really sure if this is true but it does seem to work in many cases since the amount of junk mail I get now is less than one a month.

That's a great idea! Pity it doesn't work for spam email - the cost part.

Same here. For kicks I checked my USPS Informed Delivery emails and not only did I find one with Hello Fresh, it has its own dedicated section within the email with share links.

It seems like Hello Fresh has an agreement with and/or pays USPS to deliver their advertisements, to the point of getting a spot in their emails.

Physical mail isn't covered by the legislation. Anyone can have bulk mail delivered by the postman, to any address. There is no way to opt-out of snail-mail, unless it's unaddressed. I think you can't even opt-out of mail addressed to "Occupant".

Buy a "return to sender" stamp, apply it to the mail and give it back to the post carrier.

> Buy a "return to sender" stamp, apply it to the mail and give it back to the post carrier.

You can't. It doesn't work. (USPS) Most of the junk mail we receive is presort, bulk rate, etc., and there's no return service for it. The letter carrier will reject it and give it back to you. You can throw it out. You can write to the sender (email/post) and request removal from their list.

One problem I get, is that I've "gone paperless" everywhere possible, yet some entities still insist on sending paper mail in certain circumstances. These are very important bits of correspondence, and I can't seem to get across the message that I don't want their paper shit. In one case I've received physical membership cards, and one of them was stolen from my mailbox (somewhere after Informed Delivery scanned it, even.) But they can't administratively prevent these mailings from being triggered.