Mailman Steve Padgett, age 58, stood before a Federal Court judge recently to receive his sentence. The crime? Delaying and destroying the very mail he was supposed to be delivering– third class mail, or more commonly, the JUNK.

This spring, authorities were contacted by a utility worker who noticed what appeared to be an excessive amount of mail piled at Steve Padgett’s home in Raleigh. When postal authorities went to investigate, they discovered third-class mail stacked in Padgett’s garage and buried in his lawn.

According to Padgett’s attorney Andrew McCoppin, it wasn’t a conscious stand against waste or a junk mail protest that spurred the mailman to hold onto the mailers. Rather, it was the inability to meet the demands of a job in a growing part of the county while contending with heart problems and complications from his diabetes.

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There’s an interesting post over at the Word To The Wise blog about the “Report Spam” button.

Apparently, some marketing folks (Q Interactive and MarketingSherpa) ran a survey that suggests the button is meaningless now. That’s because too many people click “Report Spam” when all they really want to do is unsubscribe.

This statement from Laura Atkins is what I found most interesting (which I’ve summarized in a very unprofessional way below):

“I think this is a demonstration of the disconnect between traditional marketing (telemarketing and direct mail especially) and email marketing. In traditional marketing…recipients do not have an easy way to send negative feedback…In email marketing, however…they have a way to communicate back to the marketer that they do not have in other forms of marketing.”

There’s definitely a “disconnect.” Enlightened marketers know how to treat email. Ignorant markters who just treat email as “cheap direct marketing” are ruining email for all of us, and need to have their computers taken away from them.

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