I started renting a PO box at the local post office a couple months ago. This was mostly because, more and more, I’m needing to use an address for my side business Coffey Design. Since I work out of the home, I didn’t really like the idea of putting my home address on registry information, newsletters and other marketing materials that could be seen by many.
PO Boxes are actually quite cheap. If I remember, it’s less than $30-40 per 6 months. I got the smallest one they offer. However, the great part is that if I ever receive a package that is too big to fit, they’ll place it in a larger box and put the key in my PO Box. Pretty nice deal.
I hadn’t had much activity on the box (nor did I expect any) until a few weeks ago. I had not checked it in a while and when I opened ‘er up, I found a pile of mail. Well… not mail, but spam!
Several credit card offers, a slick postcard on full color printing, the obligatory scam from “Listing Corp,” and a nice catalog from ULINE Shipping Supply (for all my shipping needs). Those Listing Corp folks send me or my clients something every time I register a domain name. I hate them because their letters are designed to look like a real bill for domain name renewal when all they are doing is trying to get you to renew with them instead of your original registrar. I’m sure plenty of unexperienced domain owners fall for this all the time.
Having a nice pile of wasted paper made me appreciate email a bit more. As annoying as email spam is, it at least can be filtered reasonably well with software. I didn’t ask a single one of these companies for anything. It is clear that they are either buying or skimming registry information.
Perhaps I should give some of these anti-spam ideas a try.
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