Institutional snail spam: A daily statement from your bank??

Not so long ago (ok, maybe more than 10 years ago), the banking branch of the French postal service would send you a statement by mail every time you made a transaction with your credit card. So you ended up receiving more mail from them than from anyone else you knew. Then they probably figured it was:

1. costly and not environment-friendly, since they had to pay for postage (or at least pay their employees to print out the statement, sort it and deliver it), for the paper, and for the energy needed to ship the statement to the right address;
2. annoying, since you were literally flooded with paper;
3. counter-productive, since it gave more work to do to the postal workers while bringing very little value to the customers who ended up not even opening their mail.

Somewhere along the way, the postal service decided to stop sending their customers daily statements and put an end to that form of institutional spam (incidentally, the banking branch of the postal service is now a separate entity).

Some people probably miss that type of correspondence, and the postal service itself the self-imposed work load. Fortunately, now that a lot of (most of) our communication is done electronically, they seem to have secured other sources of revenue. Among the most sustainable ones is delivering paper advertising, considering the proportion of ads we get in the mail...

I feel that spam has sort of filled this slot, except for a number of things:

1. the medium has changed: spam now also comes directly to your virtual mail box or to your cell phone;
2. the flooding has taken gigantic proportions if we combine all sources of unwanted communication (other people will tell you the extent to which it is clogging the series of tubes);
3. the content has become more varied even though certain topics seem to be all-time favorites. Among those are personal enhancement, banking transactions, urgently needed medical care, over-the-counter or prescription drugs, software updates and bargains of various types;
4. the identity of the send has also diversified: now you have a lot more special friends who think you want to hear from them.

The funny thing is that, since the French postal service has become an email provider, you can still get your daily fix of spam through them, if not from them.