Email is a wonderful thing. It’s immediate and convenient and doesn’t require you to throw away the outer envelope or detach the lower portion and address the return envelope or even search for a stamp. Sure, eventually your junk mail folder bursts with spam mail and even your inbox gets an unhealthy amount of spam despite filters, but it’s easily disposed of with a simple click of the mouse.

Yet we bemoan the demise of the art of letter-writing and miss the excitement and anticipation of a letter long hoped for from a loved one far away. Even I wax nostalgic at times for such things. But the daily contents of my postal mail box is enough to cure me of that.

Inevitably it is filled with circulars, large cardboard coupons, flyers, junk mail, mail-grams, and sweepstakes entry forms that promise riches.
There is one set of sales circulars that takes up the whole mailbox and often the mailman is so generous, he gives me two of them. My real mail is wrapped up in this bundle of newsprint and usually spills out all over the porch when I try to remove the contents from the box.

Worst of all are the letters that disguise themselves as real mail. My telephone service provider sends several a week, sometimes several in one day. I have had to learn to look for the red line at the top of the envelope which indicates that it is a very important overdue bill notice. I have learned to keep those and throw the rest away. I figure that for every one real piece of mail, there are about six pieces of junk mail.

I realize this is not just a burden on me, but also on the US Postal Service and its dedicated mail carriers. Think of trudging through ice and snow just to deliver a bundle of sales offers and sweepstakes promos – how demoralizing.

And now and again there are the stories of mounds of mail being found in the homes of deceased mail carriers. I can’t really blame them, I wouldn’t want to carry all that garbage around either. This happened a few months ago in my area. A mail carrier didn’t return from his rounds and his supervisor went to his home to check on him. What he found was that the mail carrier had expired of a heart attack. He also found a lot of mail, years worth of it.

Most of it was junk mail, circulars, filler mail and mail for people who had moved with no forwarding address. Had he lived, the mail carrier would have faced federal charges but I for one, would like to say “thank you”.

I don’t have time every day to scrutinize the mail and sort out the important items from the junk offers and those addressed to “current resident”. I would prefer my mailman hoard my mail for me, instead of it being kept in piles at my house.

If my mail carrier secretly spirited away all my sales circulars and junk mail, I wouldn’t mind a bit. I might even give him a nice envelope with a tip at Christmas. Alas, the federal government takes a dim view of mail carriers sorting through the mail and only delivering the really important stuff.

Personally, I wish more mail carriers would do it.