Spam-proof Snail-mail Inboxes

I was just considering signing up for chooseyourcolor.com (I refuse to give them a link.), but then I started thinking…  See the next-to-last sentence on that page?  “Your information will be shared with our marketing partners.”  Oh, but I can just give them one of my spam addresses.  Wait, I don’t have a snail-mail spam address, and snail-mail is really more important than email.  But how would a snail-mail spam address work?

To start, it must be indistinguishable from a conventional address, at least to corporations and/or courts.  It must be either anonymous or actually yours to circumvent this clause: “Failure to submit accurate registration information will result in loss of eligibility.”  To actually be yours, it has to be a summer home or some such, or a post-office box.  To be anonymous, it would have to be either a post office box (Would the post office give a box’s owner away?) or a commercial mail receiving agency.

Most of us don’t have summer homes, so let’s consider the other two options.  Post office boxes are commonly used as “real” addresses – check.  If the box isn’t yours, it would have to be sorted by a CMRA.  Even if it is yours, someone has to sort through all the spam.  Are CMRAs commonly used to receive “real” mail?  If not, it must somehow hide from the spammers.

So when the CMRA gets a package, it checks that it’s addressed to a customer who is anticipating it.  If not, it gets chucked.  I don’t know how long it would be kept for the customer to retrieve it, but after a certain amount of time it would probably get chucked anyway.  I wonder if this is already being done?  Maybe our post offices could do it, accompanied by a law that spammers can’t avoid the mechanism.  Hmm…  What do you think?