Sneaky Mail

Direct mail marketers (aka companies which send junk mail) have become very sneaky and sophisticated in devising clever ways to make people want to open their advertisements. Solicitations disguised as government notices, bills, and even personal mail from "friends" have become common.

These are all examples of undesirable messages being disguised as important messages to get past the defenses we've all built up to the influx of junk mail.

But it also seems to me that the opposite could become common: important messages disguised as junk mail so that most people will ignore them.

For example, credit card companies are legally required to notify customers when they change the terms and conditions of accounts. But some of these changes are fairly egregious, and sometimes it may be in the card company's best interest for customers to not know about the changes so they can collect additional money in the form of penalty fees.

It is bad enough that these announcements are usually described in tiny type using language which is utterly incomprehensible to tenured professors of contract law.

But if a credit card company really wanted to make sure nobody read the new terms, it could enclose them in a brightly-colored bulk-rate envelope with starbursts proclaiming "DON'T MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY!" thus guaranteeing that 98% of the population would simply throw it away without bothering to find out the contents might actually be something important.

Remember, if this happens, you read about it here first.