If you’re going to Anaheim and get an envelope from Experient–it’s almost certainly NOT junk mail.
It’s probably your ALA badge and exhibit card.
And you’ll notice that it has $0.59 postage, which junk mail would almost never have.
Yes, I know, I’m as likely as anyone else to discard junk mail unopened–but that gets a little tricky:
- You should probably open solicitations for credit cards and shred the actual application form–and those tend to show up as first-class mail.
- Similarly, other very individualized “junk” mail may included pages that you don’t want someone fishing out of your garbage.
One simple rule of thumb is that you should always open first-class mail. Sure, some of it’s still junk, but you’re only out a few seconds to open the envelope and scan the contents. Unless you get a lot more of it than we do, this won’t cost you more than an hour a year, and probably not that much.
