I don't think you understand how junk mail works. There are a few hundred companies in the US who print junk mail. They are located in the cities that the junk mail will eventually be delivered in. They receive huge discounts to pre-sort the mail by zip code and palletize it in such a way as to cleanly slip into the USPS's system at the last possible logistic point. It might cost a regular human being $0.49 to send a letter. A presort mailer might pay $0.12 or $0.09 or $0.07 (or less) to send a letter. But that's because the USPS provides only the last mile rather than cross-country transport.
The reason this revenue stream is so important to the USPS is logistics, overhead vs marginal cost. As long as you're delivering a couple of pieces of mail to each house every day you can price those items marginally. Average Mail Per Address (AMPA) needs to be at least 3-5 for the USPS's pricing to work. If everyone opted out of junk mail AMPA would drop into a range more like 0.5-1.5 and then there's proportionally much less in the way of marginal cost and it's all the overhead of driving/walking from one address to the next. And then the USPS has to change all the pricing to go up by 200% or more and that'll never fly in Congress.
The other problem is that reducing the mail volume by 50%-90% would result in massive layoffs of workers (which won't look good for Congress) and it would reduce influence and power for those in charge of things. Few people ever willingly accept their diminishing importance.
I'm not in favor of the USPS continuing to assault my mailbox with junk mail. But I don't think there's any hope of things getting fixed until they have such an awful year that mail stops for a while and Congress reforms their mandate. I give it maybe 20% odds of happening in the next decade.
I am not sure exactly. I would imagine that by the 1970s or 1980s it was. I used to work for a different mail forwarding company than either Outbox or Earthclass Mail and worked on an internal version of the mail imaging/OCR/barcoding/etc machine.
The papers that I read detailed the efforts of folks to make OCR software primarily for the USPS for mail sorting machines. The earliest papers I saw were early 80s. You can read more about the history of mail sorting here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_sorter
I would tend to assume that the advances in mail sorting roughly coincided with bulk mailing but I can't point the causation arrow. It could be that bulk mailing really took off and the USPS got swamped and then people started making mail sorting machines. Or it could be that people invented the machines, the USPS then rolled them out and then you saw presort discounts and then bulk mailing took off. I'm not sure which.
Even if Congress LET the USPS charge $1.50 per letter that doesn't guarantee that they would stop the dramatic discounts for presorted mail.
If Congress MANDATED that the USPS charge $1.50 per letter with no discounts the deluge of junk mail would be vastly reduced. When the price goes up 10x the volume would go down dramatically. Maybe only 5x or maybe 50x. It probably wouldn't be linear. But it absolutely would go down.
Even better is that what little junk mail you got might actually be useful because at the $1.50 price the company would have to be statistically pretty damn sure you're interested.
The reason this revenue stream is so important to the USPS is logistics, overhead vs marginal cost. As long as you're delivering a couple of pieces of mail to each house every day you can price those items marginally. Average Mail Per Address (AMPA) needs to be at least 3-5 for the USPS's pricing to work. If everyone opted out of junk mail AMPA would drop into a range more like 0.5-1.5 and then there's proportionally much less in the way of marginal cost and it's all the overhead of driving/walking from one address to the next. And then the USPS has to change all the pricing to go up by 200% or more and that'll never fly in Congress.
The other problem is that reducing the mail volume by 50%-90% would result in massive layoffs of workers (which won't look good for Congress) and it would reduce influence and power for those in charge of things. Few people ever willingly accept their diminishing importance.
I'm not in favor of the USPS continuing to assault my mailbox with junk mail. But I don't think there's any hope of things getting fixed until they have such an awful year that mail stops for a while and Congress reforms their mandate. I give it maybe 20% odds of happening in the next decade.