I’m getting seriously fed up of retrieving bullshit flyers, catalogs and packets of tissues and god knows what else out of my mailbox. Not only is the bloody thing hard to open and close, but I’ve got to pay for city trash bags to get the stuff carted away by the trash men.
When I leave the country, I come back and the mailbox is jammed to the brim with trash mail, and there’s no sign of the bills I need to pay and which are now overdue.
I’m on my way home tonight and catch up with two women who are busy stuffing their advertising shite into everybody’s mailboxes, and decide to wait on my doorstep to see what they would do. They seemed to sense I was about to unload on them, so they gave my mailbox a wide berth. Lucky for them.
So, anybody have any success in thwarting the street spammers. Does a gruff note in Chinese pinned to the mailbox work? Should I wire the metal door up to the mains every day after the mailman has come? Keep a hungry rat in there? Any ideas appreciated …
This would be illegal in the US. I was surprised that it wasn’t illegal here too. I hate all that junk, but more than that, I can’t believe politicians can walk into an apartment complex and give me their fliers and tissues in person!!! Oh no, I just thought of something worse–politicians handing out their fliers to little 5-year-olds!
How about posting a sign in chinese on your mailbox, asking them not to stuff it with ads? Kind of like the plaques Christians put on their front doors for the folks who want to convert them.
Perhaps you can write to the head of the EPA and make a complaint. They have just imposed strict restrictions on plastic bag use so they might be receptive to reducing waste in this area too.
Or you could ask Maoman to tell you what to put on a sign that you affix to your mailbox that stops a lot of them. There’s a thread about it somewhere, but I couldn’t find it.
I just caught a cold, so those tissues come in handy in the pocket. They are also good travel companions; emergency toilet paper, napkins, bandage etc. So I save them for a rainy day.
Where I come from it is not against the law to distribute this kind of “direct mail”, but if you sign on a list and put a sticker on the mailbox, you should not receive it, and could complain to the authorities.
Back to topic.
Don’t you have any friends, neighbors or management/doorman that you can trust the mailbox key to, so they can empy your mailbox every few days, and keep it safe until you are back?
-I have not considered this any problem at all.
Hottala!!
It’s annoying, but you mention that you have a doorman. He could keep your mail for you (or at least empty the trash) whle you’re away. My old place used to have a cardboard box under the mailboxes. Everyone just threw the junk in there, and someone took it to the recycling truck (you don’t have to pay for rubbish bags for that stuff). Maybe you could suggest that to the doorman.
Brian
We have a trashbag hanging by ours in my current apartment. I don’t know the arrangement for when I move though since there are only two tenants in my building. My downstairs neighbor and me. It’s not very frustrating, but I have either had a doorman or roommates to take care of the junk mailings. I’d say give the rat a try, but train it so that it’s friendly only to hands that are not stuffing a single piece of paper or a pack of tissues into the box.
After things started going missing from my mailbox last year (letters or packages friends said they sent but never arrived) I got a P.O. box. They are not expensive and solved the problem of worrying about security. You could get one, change your mailing address for your bills, and then just let your mailbox fill up until they can
I always thought it would be cool if the post office provided an online service where you could go see a list of things currently in your box and/or a webcam view of the box so you would know whether you should bother going all the way to the post office to check it.
I wonder how much junk mail is produced and distributed in Taipei daily? I’m sure an accurate estimation in tons brought to the attention of the right person at the EPA might prod them into considering street spam as a problem worth adressing.
And it’s not just the immense waste of paper – there’s all the plastic too, like the tissue wrappers.
Monkey, what’s your address? Taichung or Taipei?
I will send you a test junk mail package and see what happens. I will write: BOMB INSIDE< do not place inside mail box… and see what the postal man does…
smile
Great issue Monkey, and great comment below:
“I wonder how much junk mail is produced and distributed in Taipei daily? I’m sure an accurate estimation in tons brought to the attention of the right person at the EPA might prod them into considering street spam as a problem worth adressing.”
But better than delivering a mere statistic to the head of EPA (or in conjunction with that), we ought to deliver the damn mail. Someone ought to organize citizens to collect all of their junk mail for a week and deliver it en masse to the EPA (along with the statistics, a petition and draft legislation). It would make an impressive pile. And after the plastic ban, I would think they would be receptive to enacting appropriate legislation.
The trash generated by this is considerable. In the US, a person’s mailbox is technically the property of the US government (the postal service). I don’t think that the Taiwan paper-pushers are ready for that, but the case for cutting pollution is a good one, coming on the heels of the plastic deal.
Another good idea is to move to the top of a mountain. It also helps keeping the junk mail down.
Three suggestions:
a) Embark on a crusade to clean up the mailboxes (bring a shovel and a very large container).
b) Organize death squads to eliminate all junk mail delivery girls.
c) Worry about something more important, like impending war, earning more money, getting laid etc.
Very droll, formosa. Except that dogs don’t shit in mailbox – at least not yet.
Monkey wrote: “Very droll, formosa. Except that dogs don’t shit in mailboxes – at least not yet.”
Hehe. Monkey, you’ve never been to Wanhua snake market area, I guess.
Expect yet more unnecessary paper in your mailbox courtesy of the Taipei City government. In today
Has anybody ever been successful in having your mail forwarded by the Taiwan post office?
Before my last move (from Taipei City to Taipei County) I faithfully trotted down to the post office in charge of my area, found the special window they told me to go to, got the right change of address cards, filled them out with all kinds of different permuations of English and Chinese names for the mail I usually got. I handed the cards to the guy in charge who looked them over and promised there would be no problems and my mail would soon begin to be forwarded to my new address.
In addition, I made sure that all three of the old door guards in my building knew I was moving and of course they all promised to send back to the post office any mail that came to my old address.
Of course I never received any forwarded mail. Not a single piece.
It may be likely that one or more of the door guards, who were also in charge of putting the whole building’s mail into the right boxes, just tossed my mail into the trash. But I was on friendly terms with the old guys after all the years I had lived in the building and I had seen them return other peoples’ mail to the postman so at least some of my mail should have been returned to the post office and then forwarded to me. Is that too much to ask?
Apparently in Taiwan it is. Has anybody here ever received mail that has been forwarded in Taiwan?
And if not, why is the post office here so incompetent when it comes to forwarding mail when they are so good at deciphering all the variations of Romanised place and street names?
Also, is there such a thing here as temporarily holding mail delivery to an address for the few weeks/months while you are away? The people I ask have never heard of such a thing here.
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I caught some old codger shoving crap into my mailbox and had a right old go at him. Made absolutely no difference of course.
As MT says, the correct course of action is for everyone to dump their junk mail at the EPA HQ. Of course no one will ever be arsed to do that.