Funferal

Snail mail spam

So yesterday I collected all the stuff that had accumulated in my departmental mailbox over the holidays – mainly library books. And there in the middle of it was an envelope from ‘ICLS’. “What is ICLS?” I hear you ask? Why it’s the Internet Corporation Listing Service, and they had sent me a ‘notice’ for services (in relation to one of my minor domains) for 2005 of $35. They do, kindly, include text somewhere in the middle noting that “This is not a bill. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept the offer” but it looked a lot like an invoice to me.
Wow. So now I’m getting snail mail spam – by which I mean junk mail that originated with my online identity (in this case I presume a WHOIS listing). Is this what life has come to? Where can we go from here? [Incidentally, it was worry about stuff like this that led me to use the campus address rather than a home address….]