Pennysaver is the only mail many would consider a blessing when it comes to dealing with mail that comes uninvited [aka, junk mail]. In fact, a good part of California looks forward to getting the Pennysaver. Not only does this short magazine/catalogue type booklet come for free, it also comes with useful information on things you would like to buy and sell in your specific area. I recently read an entry over at Kissui.net, and it shows the way with which the advertisors in Japan currently target their audience. This is an open area that spammers and advertisers in America have yet to wander into. Junk mail in America, snail junk mail that is, has advanced from credit card offers to more “advanced” offers such as life insurance [insurance companies want my wife, kids and my grand children to be happy after I am gone..] from Kaiser Permanente and newspaper subscription offers. Something that I have noticed myself since December of last year is that these direct advertisers [not the ones listed above], are using another tactic to lure people in; combining the snail mail with the Internet to target you more. One now gets emails with the same information as ones home mail. “I’ve been getting junk mail for ages now; what’s new here?” you ask. The difference is that these emails now contain your home number and your address, listed out, telling you that you submitted this information on a certain date to a company that shared the information with others [others meaning advertisers]. Which “company” is it that you submitted the information to? In most cases, it is your phone company.

I had been enjoying a spam free world in some of my email accounts for a while now. Those email accounts received nothing but emails from my contacts, and emails from the email provider themselves notifying me of any upgrades or new policies, which was ok. However, for some reason and all of a sudden, those email inboxes are now bombarded with email messages every hour, almost each email containing all of my information, including my address, phone number, and the type of services I prefer. Upon further inquiry, I found out that my phone company had shared this information with different advertisers, and now these people both mailed me the advertisements, and also emailed me the exact same information in many cases. What is worse is that these companies themselves shared the information with other companies, increasing the amount of spam being received on my once quiet and peaceful email inbox. The spam filters sort out almost all of the spam, sure, but the hassle of going through the spam filter to make sure none of the email I actually need gets routed to it wastes time also.

Yuki at Kissui.net recently gave, in my view, a good example of how advertisers direct specific products and services based on age and gender in Japan at the moment. Advertisers who send unwanted mail [both snail and electronic] in America are still sticking to the traditional way of sending all the people the same unwanted mail, so far. May be they are not sure of the consequences [mainly, privacy lawsuits]. All the houses in almost any neighborhood in California at the moment receive the same kind of junk mail. While it may be good to receive an offer for DirectTV for a special price from a vendor, receiving the same ad from more than 7 different vendors in the same county, offering the same price, may be something that isn’t favorable. Maybe the kind of advertisement catered to at least your age or gender is better than getting over 20 different brochures in the mail everyday, all advertising something that you are not interested in. At least that way you have the prospect of knowing that the “ad” you are looking at has the possibility of affecting your future purchasing decision, because other people of the same age [or gender] may be interested in it.

Apart from the junk mail, rain has been sending messages all the time now also, which is actually good. Below is a picture I took while on the freeway in Southern OC.