But how many people have to change their snail mail address due to spam?

This is the message I found in my snail mail box: "A sampling of mail volume received for post office boxes shows that your box has accumulated more mail than it could hold during three of the last five days..." Indeed, it's true. The lock was falling apart because I couldn't twist the key for all the crap crammed into it. Many times I've gone to get mail to find a note that I needed to go during business hours to the desk to pick up the excess mail. It's been quite a nuisance.

There is one cause for this trouble, and it is the paper equivalent of spam: CATALOGS. In close to five years time, I seem to have gotten on the mailing list of every catalog store in the country. Most of the time, I'd take the haul to a table at the post office and sort through them, throwing the majority of them into a 'round file' beside the table.

So our options were few: get a larger box for slightly more a year, keep the old box and get something called 'caller service' which costs 868 bucks! a year or revert to having mail delivered solely to our street address. The last option would never do, for it's an even smaller box, which gets stuffed solely with all the 'to occupant' spam. So we had only one option, really.

As I filled out the forwarding form, I laughed to read that the Post Office will not forward catalogs. For a short while, we'll enjoy having a very spacious box. And in the future, when I do order online, I will hunt for the well hidden checkpoint that gives the option to not have my address shared with other businesses.

(Also, if you've sent something to me via snail mail, and I never acknowledged its arrival, consider the possibility that with such a crammed box, I might not have received it.)