[LINK] Greenhouse contribution of letters

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 08:13:11AM +1100, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> I've never seen such an analysis. But it occurs to me that to assess the  
> marginal improvement would need to take into account a large number of  
> behavioural factors. For example, since you can bet that lots of people  
> will print the e-mail documents:
> - what's the inefficiency penalty (in greenhouse terms) of having  
> millions of documents printed on home inkjets instead of bulk printed?
> - what's the greenhouse impact of encouraging more use of short-life  
> home printers (leading to more replacement of consumables and more  
> frequent replacement of the printers themselves?).

another factor to consider is: what are the unintended consequences of
providing your email address to your bank or other company?

my bank, and most of my recurring bills (electricity, gas, phone, etc)
have an option for me to provide an email address to get my invoice via
email. i have declined to provide one in every case because i know that
if I provide it, they will at some point decide that they have the right
to spam me. even if they're not doing so at this moment in time, the
knowledge that there exists a database of spammable addresses will be
irresistable to their marketing vermin.

they may not be actually breaking the law due to the "existing business
relationship" weasel-words in the .au spam act, but spam is spam and i
just don't want it even if the law says it's not illegal. my mailbox,
my mail server, *I* decide what i want sent to it, not some marketing
scumbag in some company that i just happen to do business with.

anyway, that would be extremely undesirable because it would be a real
pain (or impossible in some cases) to terminate my association with the
spamming company - my policy is to permanently boycott anyone who spams
me.  i do not intend to ever make an exception to this rule.  i do not
and will not do business with spammers.

so, it's better to just not give them the opportunity to get on my
boycott list.....it's just inevitable that some marketing droid within
the bank will eventually find some excuse to spam.



yet another relevant issue is: what format would they use? plain text is
best. PDF is tolerable. but most likely they'll do something stupid like
HTML or, worse, MS Word.

craig

ps: i don't provide my phone number to banks or other companies for the
same reason. i dont want it to be easy or cheap for them to contact
me. i want it to be expensive (both in terms of printing & postal
charges, and also in terms of effort required to do so) because that
expense is a disincentive to do so without good reason. there's also the
secondary reason that i want all communication from such companies etc
to be in writing.

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>