Veteran Mailman Joins War Against Spam

Retired California Postal Worker goes from making a living delivering junk mail to starting a business battling spam.

With over twenty-five years of service in the snail mail industry, retired Letter Carrier, Michael Barrett, has directed his new found free-time towards the battle against spam. During his career he estimates that he has delivered over 12 million pieces of junk mail. That averages out to approximately 4 pieces per household per day. "That's nothing," he says, "compared to the number of unsolicited emails the average computer user receives."

On his route, whenever a customer complained about junk mail, he would hand them a form, he downloaded from the Internet, that they could fill out and submit to the Direct Marketing Association requesting that their name and address be removed from the DMA's member mailing lists. "This was very effective for the customer," he says, and "it also reduced my load considerably." He warns though, that clicking on the "unsubscribe" or "remove" links in unsolicited emails will result in just the opposite.

"Something needs to be done about this problem," Mr. Barrett says, "before people revert back to snail mail to ensure that their communications don't get lost in the increasing flood of spam." He sees two real solutions. Government regulation or market forces, where the sender would be charged for each email. Neither of which, he feels will be soon coming. Meanwhile, he provides an affordable anti-spam service for users of Microsoft® Outlook Express® and claims that it enables users to reduce the amount of spam that reaches their Inbox by 90% or more.The service (www.spamXpress.com) is a web based configuration utility that enhances the spam filtering capabilities of Outlook Express®.