By Jeffrey T. Donner

August 19, 2026

The physical mailbox has become a spam folder that citizens are legally required to monitor.

That proposition sounds flippant until one considers how Americans actually use the mail in 2026. Most of what arrives in the ordinary household mailbox is not personal correspondence. It consists of advertisements, solicitations, political mailers, catalogs, credit-card offers, insurance pitches, real-estate solicitations, charitable requests, coupons, circulars, and other material that the recipient neither requested nor particularly wanted. Yet mixed into that stream of largely disposable paper may be an IRS notice carrying an administrative deadline, a jury summons, notice of a court hearing, an insurance check, a government refund, correspondence affecting a license or benefit, or some other document whose consequences are entirely disproportionate to the envelope in which it arrives.

The result is an odd form of compulsory attention. A rational person who has learned from experience that most physical mail is useless cannot simply stop examining it. The government still uses the same communications channel for matters that can affect money, property, legal rights, tax liabilities, and obligations to appear in court. The citizen therefore must continuously sort the signal from the noise because failure to identify the one consequential piece of paper among twenty inconsequential ones may carry penalties far greater than the inconvenience of dealing with the mail itself.

This is more than a complaint about junk mail. It is a problem of administrative design. Government has chosen to transmit legally significant information through a communications medium whose signal-to-noise ratio has deteriorated dramatically, while imposing almost the entire cost of that deterioration upon the recipient.

The numbers confirm that this is not simply a subjective impression. The United States Postal Service reports that it handled approximately 108.7 billion pieces of mail during fiscal year 2025. Of that enormous total, approximately 56.8 billion pieces were Marketing Mail, compared with approximately 42 billion pieces of First-Class Mail. Thus, Marketing Mail by itself constituted more than half of the entire national mail stream.

Against that background, it should surprise no one that people increasingly treat the mailbox as a low-priority communications channel. The remarkable fact is that government continues to insist that they cannot safely do so.

The Problem Is Not New, but the World Around It Has Changed

I encountered this burden long before anyone could plausibly attribute it to age, children, divorce, debt, a busy household, or the accumulated disorganization of middle age.

I began practicing law in 1999 at Holland & Knight. I was twenty-four years old, newly graduated from law school, energetic, optimistic, unmarried, without children, and without anything resembling the financial and administrative obligations I have today. Like most young associates at a large law firm, I worked in an environment in which time was itself a commodity. A lawyer might spend ten or eleven hours in the office in order to record eight productive billable hours, and even modest administrative distractions had an identifiable opportunity cost.

Even then, I had trouble keeping up with physical mail. My solution was to accumulate it and designate approximately one day each week when I would bring the pile with me and sort through it. What should have been an insignificant household task could take forty minutes. That was forty minutes of professional time spent determining which pieces of paper mattered and which belonged in the trash.

That was more than twenty-five years ago.

Since then, virtually every other important communications system has changed beyond recognition. Federal courts use electronic filing systems. Lawyers receive immediate electronic notice when motions and orders are filed. Banking is electronic. Securities trading is electronic. Mortgage payments are electronic. Insurance premiums are paid electronically. Universities conduct registration, tuition payments, financial-aid administration, and student communications electronically. Medical providers distribute laboratory results through secure portals. People sign legally binding contracts electronically and transfer enormous sums of money without handling a sheet of paper.

The physical mailbox, however, continues to occupy an anomalous position. It has ceased to be the primary medium through which most people conduct important daily business, yet government continues to treat it as though every household carefully opens, reviews, categorizes, files, and preserves every official-looking envelope immediately upon receipt.

That assumption is increasingly detached from reality.

The Government Places High-Consequence Communications in a Low-Trust Channel

The central problem is not simply volume. It is the coexistence of radically different kinds of communications in the same undifferentiated physical stream.

A direct-mail advertisement for replacement windows has essentially no consequence if ignored. An IRS notice may be entirely different. The Taxpayer Advocate Service warns taxpayers that ignoring IRS correspondence can result in additional interest or penalties and, depending on the notice, can affect administrative appeal rights. The IRS likewise continues to instruct taxpayers to pay careful attention to notices and letters received through the mail.

This creates an information-design problem that would be considered unacceptable in almost any sophisticated private communications system. Email providers distinguish spam from ordinary correspondence. Businesses separate transactional notices from marketing communications. Banks send fraud alerts by more than one channel. Courts provide electronic docket notices to registered lawyers. Smartphones distinguish emergency notifications from advertisements. Software systems increasingly allow users to search, categorize, archive, prioritize, and retrieve communications according to their significance.

The mailbox does none of this. The taxpayer gets a pile of paper.

Somewhere in that pile may be a notice beginning a thirty-day period. Somewhere else may be a jury summons. There may be a check. There may be an insurance cancellation notice. There may be a small-claims hearing notice that does not ask whether the recipient is available on the specified date but simply announces that the hearing will occur.

The system assumes that the recipient will successfully identify every important item and distinguish it from the commercial material surrounding it.

When that does not happen, the usual response is to invoke personal responsibility: the citizen should have opened his mail.

That answer is not entirely wrong. It is also incomplete.

Personal Responsibility Does Not Excuse Bad System Design

I have personally lost money because I failed to process physical mail properly. On more than one occasion during my adult life, I have discovered a government check after it had become stale.

Most recently, I discovered an IRS refund check for approximately $1,500 that I had failed to deposit timely. I requested a replacement, as I had successfully done on an earlier occasion. By then, however, the IRS claimed that I owed money on a different tax matter. Rather than reissue the money to me, the government retained the amount and credited it against the asserted liability.

Had I simply deposited the original check when it arrived, the $1,500 would have been in my bank account.

That was my mistake. The check arrived, and I did not cash it. A serious argument about public administration does not require pretending otherwise.

But assigning individual fault does not answer the institutional question. Modern systems are routinely designed around the reality that human attention is finite. Hospitals use redundant safeguards because medical professionals make mistakes. Commercial aircraft use warnings and checklists because pilots have limited attention. Banks monitor transactions because customers do not identify every fraud attempt. Email providers developed spam filters precisely because it became unreasonable to expect users manually to review unlimited quantities of unsolicited electronic advertising.

A well-designed system does not merely identify the individual who failed after the fact. It asks whether predictable failures can be reduced before they occur.

The relevant question therefore is not whether a citizen should open important mail. Of course he should. The question is why government continues to insist upon transmitting high-consequence information through a medium whose ordinary commercial use has systematically conditioned people to expect low-value content.

The Administrative-Burden Problem

Public-administration scholars increasingly examine governmental requirements through the concept of administrative burden: the learning costs, compliance costs, time costs, and psychological costs that individuals incur when dealing with institutions.

Physical mail is a particularly mundane illustration because no single envelope appears burdensome. The burden emerges cumulatively.

The citizen must retrieve the mail, inspect the sender, open anything that might matter, determine what the communication means, identify the relevant deadline, determine which agency or subdivision is involved, preserve the document, locate prior correspondence, respond through whatever channel the agency permits, and retain proof that the response was submitted.

If the matter remains unresolved, the citizen may have to locate those same documents months or years later.

The problem becomes particularly acute when dealing with large governmental organizations. A citizen may receive correspondence bearing different notice numbers, telephone numbers, service-center addresses, and departmental names. The agency may possess sophisticated internal computer systems, but the citizen’s side of the interface can still consist of envelopes, paper folders, certified-mail slips, and stacks of documents.

The irony becomes difficult to ignore when government itself has trouble processing the paper it requires citizens to generate.

The National Taxpayer Advocate has repeatedly criticized the IRS’s continued dependence upon paper. Its 2025 Annual Report to Congress identified outdated paper processes as a serious taxpayer problem, explaining that paper-based administration slows dispute resolution, delays refunds, increases transcription errors, and creates additional burdens for taxpayers. The criticism is particularly significant because it does not come from someone standing outside the system complaining about inconvenience. It comes from the statutorily established organization within the IRS whose function is to identify systemic problems affecting taxpayers.

An earlier Taxpayer Advocate report documented an especially remarkable statistic. At one point, taxpayer responses sent to the IRS concerning proposed adjustments were taking an average of approximately 251 days to process.

Consider the asymmetry. The government sends a citizen a notice and may require a response within a defined period. The citizen is expected to identify the envelope among his ordinary mail, understand the issue, find the necessary records, prepare an answer, send it to the correct place, and meet the government’s deadline. The citizen’s paper response may then enter an administrative system that takes many months to process it.

During that interval, additional notices may be generated. Interest may continue to accrue. The taxpayer may not know whether the submission was received, whether anyone has read it, whether it has been associated with the correct account, or whether another division of the agency knows that it exists.

That is not a communications system one would design from scratch in 2026.

Physical Mail Also Creates a Recordkeeping Asymmetry

The current system places another burden upon citizens that receives too little attention: government frequently expects individuals to preserve better records of correspondence than government makes readily accessible to them.

Taxpayers are expected to preserve documentation. Litigants are expected to retain evidence. Businesses are required to maintain records. If a taxpayer later claims that he responded to an IRS notice or paid a particular amount, the practical burden may fall upon him to prove what happened.

But consider the technological asymmetry. The IRS almost certainly generated the original notice electronically before printing and mailing it. Somewhere within the government’s systems is an electronic record showing the notice, the taxpayer identification information, the tax period, the date, and the amount.

The citizen gets paper.

If he later wants to know what occurred, he may need to find the envelope or letter among physical files accumulated over years. If he moved offices, changed accountants, changed law firms, suffered a flood, experienced a divorce, reorganized a home office, or simply failed to establish a perfect filing system, the document may be difficult to locate.

Modern electronic communications have largely solved this problem. A lawyer searching for an email sent six years earlier can often locate it in seconds using a few words. Electronic court dockets preserve filings chronologically. Online banking permits users to retrieve years of transactions. Commercial vendors maintain order histories.

Physical government correspondence remains astonishingly dependent upon the citizen having created his own private archival system.

The Psychological Cost Is Real Even Though It Is Difficult to Measure

Administrative burdens also have psychological consequences. That part of the problem is easy to dismiss because it is less measurable than postage, hours, or dollars.

Government correspondence often arrives precisely when a person is least equipped to deal with it. An IRS envelope may announce a problem involving thousands of dollars. A court notice may require action the recipient does not understand. An insurance letter may concern a claim, cancellation, or dispute. A person may know perfectly well that delaying will not improve the situation and nevertheless postpone opening the document because he anticipates bad news.

Once several unresolved communications accumulate, the papers themselves can become a source of anxiety. A pile of mail is no longer merely a pile of mail; it becomes a physical inventory of unanswered problems.

This may be poor coping behavior, but it is also foreseeable behavior. Government should have an interest in designing administrative systems that make compliance easier, records clearer, and obligations more comprehensible. A searchable electronic account that identifies every open issue, every submission, every deadline, and every agency response would reduce precisely the sort of uncertainty that paper correspondence perpetuates.

Instead, many citizens live with stacks of documents they intend to address “one day.”

The United States Is Not the Only Country With Physical Mail, but Other Countries Have Gone Much Further

The American system is not uniquely capable of producing mail overload, and it would be inaccurate to suggest that European governments have abolished paper. Britain still sends jury summonses through the post, for example, and requires recipients in England and Wales to respond within seven days, although the response can be submitted online.

Nevertheless, the comparison with several northern European countries demonstrates that the American arrangement is not technologically inevitable.

Denmark provides the clearest example. Danish citizens with a civil-registration number generally receive communications from public authorities through a national system called Digital Post. The Danish government’s own guidance is remarkably direct: citizens receive mail from public authorities digitally and therefore generally do not receive that governmental correspondence in their physical mailbox. Digital Post is mandatory beginning at age fifteen for most citizens, subject to exemptions for those unable to use the system. The government expressly tells citizens that they are obligated to monitor Digital Post because it contains important matters such as education decisions, public benefits, and hospital appointments.

The Danish model is particularly instructive because it does not simply substitute ordinary email for paper. Citizens authenticate themselves using MitID, Denmark’s national electronic-identification system. Government communications appear in a secure digital mailbox that can be accessed through multiple platforms, and citizens can read, answer, organize, and preserve governmental correspondence there. The public-sector mailbox is synchronized across platforms, creating what amounts to a persistent governmental communications record.

Denmark even provides a mechanism resembling the type of anti-solicitation system that American policy has never developed comprehensively. Its public guidance refers to a “Robinson list” through which citizens can opt out of certain unsolicited written and telephone marketing communications.

Sweden has taken a somewhat less compulsory but still highly developed approach. The Swedish Tax Agency allows individuals and businesses to register for secure digital mailboxes through which communications from the Tax Agency and other governmental bodies arrive electronically rather than on paper. Citizens can choose among approved mailbox providers, use electronic identification for secure access, and elect to receive an email or text message when new government mail arrives.

That difference is fundamental. The Swedish citizen who chooses the system does not merely receive a random email supposedly from the tax authority, with all the phishing concerns that would entail. The email or text serves as an alert. The actual official document resides within an authenticated governmental communications environment.

Britain presents an intermediate case and, importantly, shows that the direction of travel is toward digital communications even in another large common-law country. HM Revenue & Customs presently allows taxpayers to receive some tax letters and messages through an online account or app and to receive email notifications when those communications become available. More significantly, the British government announced that beginning in 2026 HMRC would move toward a “digital by default” model for taxpayers who already interact with it electronically, while retaining an opt-out for people who need paper. The government’s stated reasons include reducing the risk that citizens miss important updates, improving recordkeeping, and allowing taxpayers greater control over their tax affairs.

Those are precisely the concerns raised here.

Switzerland should be described more cautiously. Its highly federalized governmental structure has historically made nationwide digitalization slower and less uniform than Denmark’s. The Swiss government itself acknowledges that digitization of public administration has progressed comparatively slowly. Nevertheless, Switzerland’s current national policy is expressly “digital first”: public authorities are directed to offer services digitally as standard, federal and cantonal governments are coordinating digital public services, and secure electronic communication is increasingly available for administrative procedures.

The comparison therefore does not establish that Americans alone receive junk mail or that European citizens never lose important papers. It establishes something more useful: there is no technological necessity for government to make the household mailbox the indispensable repository of legally consequential communications. Other modern democracies have already built systems in which official government correspondence is separated from commercial physical advertising and placed into authenticated, searchable digital channels.

America has largely chosen not to finish that transition.

The Danish Example Exposes the Conceptual Error

Denmark’s system reveals the conceptual mistake in the American approach.

The important distinction is not really between “paper” and “electronic” communications. The important distinction is between official communications and everything else.

American government largely treats the citizen’s physical mailing address as the universal endpoint for government communications. Commercial advertisers use the same endpoint. Political campaigns use the same endpoint. Charities use the same endpoint. Credit-card companies use the same endpoint. Real-estate speculators use the same endpoint.

The result is an inbox that contains no meaningful architecture of importance.

Denmark created a separate official inbox.

That is the idea America should borrow.

Government communications deserve a protected channel because they carry consequences that ordinary advertising does not. It is peculiar that society has spent enormous technological effort protecting email inboxes from spam while allowing the physical mailbox—the one communications channel citizens may effectively be legally required to monitor—to remain saturated with unsolicited advertising.

Congress Has Considered the Junk-Mail Problem Before

The idea of reducing unsolicited physical advertising is not new or radical. Congress considered versions of the problem before the Internet transformed communications.

In 1974, legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives that would have prohibited certain unsolicited commercial mail to individuals who registered that they did not wish to receive it. The proposal did not become law, but its existence demonstrates that Congress recognized the basic problem more than half a century ago.

Later congressional attention concentrated far more heavily upon unsolicited commercial email. That made sense during the explosion of Internet spam, but it produced an odd policy imbalance. Congress recognized that unsolicited email consumes the recipient’s time and attention, creates storage and processing costs, and makes legitimate communications harder to identify. The same economic analysis applies to physical advertising.

Indeed, physical advertising imposes costs electronic spam does not. Someone must physically retrieve it. It must be carried into the house. It must be sorted. Documents containing personal information may need to be shredded. The remainder must be discarded or recycled. Important documents must be filed somewhere.

The fact that no bill arrives for those activities does not mean that they are economically costless.

The Postal Service’s Commercial Incentives Complicate the Problem

There is an uncomfortable institutional issue underlying any serious discussion of junk mail. Marketing Mail is not merely something the Postal Service tolerates. It is a major category of postal volume.

That creates a tension between two governmental functions.

On one side, USPS has an economic interest in maintaining substantial mail volume, including advertising. On the other, government agencies depend upon the physical mail system as a mechanism for delivering legally consequential information.

The greater the volume of low-value material entering the mailbox, the less effective that mailbox becomes as a high-trust communications channel.

This is basic signal-to-noise theory. If virtually every item arriving in a communications system deserves attention, users pay attention. If most items repeatedly prove worthless, users rationally reduce the amount of attention they devote to the system.

Government cannot simultaneously encourage enormous quantities of unsolicited commercial mail and then act surprised when citizens become less attentive to their mailboxes.

At some point, the Postal Service’s commercial success in delivering advertising undermines government’s separate interest in effective legal notice.

A National Do-Not-Mail System Deserves Serious Consideration

Congress should reconsider whether Americans ought to have a meaningful legal mechanism for reducing unsolicited commercial physical mail.

Any such system would require nuance. Political speech presents First Amendment issues. Charitable communications may warrant separate treatment. Businesses should remain free to communicate with existing customers concerning genuine transactions. Local businesses legitimately rely upon advertising, and restrictions affecting postal revenue would have financial consequences for USPS.

But those complications do not justify the present default rule under which obtaining someone’s physical address effectively grants businesses an indefinite license to consume that person’s mailbox and attention.

The United States has developed legal structures governing unsolicited telephone calls, commercial text messages, and electronic marketing. Physical mail should not escape comparable scrutiny merely because its technology is older.

At minimum, citizens should have a simple national mechanism to indicate that they do not wish to receive unsolicited commercial physical advertising. It should not require locating multiple industry organizations, contacting advertisers individually, repeating opt-out requests, or devoting additional administrative labor to escaping the administrative labor imposed by the advertisements themselves.

Government Notice Should Become Digital by Default, With Paper as a Backup

The more important reform, however, concerns governmental communications.

Every federal agency should permit an individual or business to create a secure authenticated account and elect digital service of government communications. Where statutes continue to require paper notice, paper can be sent as well. The solution does not require abolishing traditional mail.

It requires redundancy and separation.

Any government communication that creates a payment obligation, contains a deadline, affects administrative or judicial review rights, schedules an appearance, affects a benefit or license, threatens a penalty, communicates collection activity, or transmits a monetary payment should appear immediately in the recipient’s secure electronic account.

The actual document should be available there as a searchable PDF or comparable permanent record.

The government should send an email and, if the recipient elects, a text message stating that new official correspondence is available. The notification itself need not contain sensitive tax or legal information. It merely needs to tell the citizen to log into the authenticated system.

The electronic portal should also permit responses. When the citizen submits a response, the system should issue an immediate time-stamped receipt establishing precisely what was submitted and when. The response should automatically associate with the correct agency file, account, tax period, case number, or other governmental record.

The system should display the status of the submission.

Received.

Under review.

Additional information required.

Decision issued.

Appeal deadline.

That is how a modern transactional information system ought to work.

This Would Benefit Government as Much as Citizens

Digital government communications should not be understood merely as another accommodation demanded by taxpayers.

Government would benefit enormously.

Electronic submissions can be routed automatically. Account numbers can be validated. Documents do not need to be manually removed from envelopes, scanned, interpreted, indexed, and associated with records. Responses cannot physically sit in a mailroom. Agencies can create automatic audit trails identifying when documents were sent and received.

Disputes over whether correspondence was actually mailed or received would diminish. The agency and citizen would share the same communications history.

Administrative employees would spend less time searching for correspondence and answering inquiries concerning whether submissions arrived. Citizens would make fewer duplicate submissions when they can see that the original is pending.

Most importantly, the agency itself would have better information.

The National Taxpayer Advocate’s criticism of paper processing demonstrates that the current burden does not fall solely upon taxpayers. Paper imposes inefficiency on government too.

Digitalization therefore is not anti-government. Properly implemented, it is simply competent government.

The Government Already Knows This

Perhaps the strongest evidence for reform is that government institutions increasingly admit the problem through their own modernization programs.

The IRS has created online taxpayer accounts. Sweden’s tax authority provides secure digital government mailboxes. Denmark made Digital Post the ordinary communications system for public authorities. HMRC in Britain is moving toward digital-by-default outbound communications specifically because digital notice reduces the likelihood that citizens will miss important information and improves recordkeeping. Switzerland’s federal government has adopted “digital first” as a strategic principle.

The debate is therefore no longer about whether electronic government communication is possible.

It is about why the United States has not made it comprehensive.

Legal Notice Should Reflect the Way People Actually Live

There is also a broader jurisprudential point.

Legal notice doctrines developed around communications technologies available at the time. Physical delivery to a person’s address historically represented a reasonable method of attempting to bring important information to his attention because there was no universally available superior system.

That historical fact should not become an eternal administrative principle.

The purpose of notice is communication, not reverence for paper.

A system genuinely interested in communicating consequential information should use the channels most likely to reach the recipient. In 2026, that ordinarily means multiple channels.

If an authenticated taxpayer has an IRS account, has supplied an email address, regularly files returns electronically, pays taxes electronically, and conducts other tax business electronically, it is difficult to identify a sensible policy reason for allowing a critical IRS notice to exist only as a piece of paper placed among advertising in the taxpayer’s physical mailbox.

Government knows who the taxpayer is.

Government knows his email address.

Government already possesses the document electronically.

Government already operates the secure account.

Yet the taxpayer remains legally responsible for monitoring the pile of paper.

That is an administrative choice, not a technological necessity.

The Mailbox Has Become a Mandatory Spam Folder

This returns to the central problem.

The physical mailbox has become a spam folder that citizens are legally required to monitor.

The analogy is unusually precise. Email spam is mostly material the recipient does not want. So is much physical advertising. Spam consumes attention. So does junk mail. Spam makes important communications harder to identify. So does junk mail.

But email systems eventually developed tools to address the problem. They filter. They categorize. They search. They preserve years of communications. They allow users to identify trusted senders. They create rules. They synchronize across devices.

The physical mailbox provides none of those tools.

Worse, the citizen cannot simply abandon it because government continues to place legally consequential communications there.

That combination distinguishes the problem from mere annoyance. The citizen is required to devote attention to a communications medium precisely because government refuses to stop using it for high-consequence matters.

Conclusion

The physical mailbox made sense as the central mechanism of official communication during most of the twentieth century. It was nearly universal, technologically simple, inexpensive, and capable of reaching almost every household in the country.

Those virtues have not disappeared. Paper mail should remain available, particularly for people who prefer it or cannot effectively use digital systems.

But the communications environment surrounding the mailbox has fundamentally changed. The Postal Service now transports tens of billions of pieces of marketing material every year. Personal correspondence has largely migrated to electronic media. Commercial transactions have moved online. Courts, banks, insurers, universities, medical providers, and businesses routinely conduct consequential affairs digitally.

Government remains one of the principal institutions preventing citizens from treating the physical mailbox as obsolete.

That should change.

Congress should consider a meaningful national mechanism allowing citizens to restrict unsolicited commercial physical advertising. More importantly, federal, state, and local governments should create authenticated digital communications systems through which legally significant notices are delivered and permanently preserved. Paper may remain as a redundant form of notice where appropriate, but citizens who have elected electronic communication should never again have to worry that the only notice of an important governmental action is sitting underneath a credit-card solicitation on the kitchen counter.

Denmark has already demonstrated that a modern democracy can create a separate, secure digital channel for official government correspondence. Sweden has established secure digital mailboxes for government communications. Britain is moving its tax authority toward digital-by-default correspondence. Switzerland has formally adopted digital-first public services as a national objective. These systems differ, and none eliminates every administrative burden, but they demonstrate that the American model is not inevitable.

The citizen should still be responsible for reading important government communications. Responsibility, however, should run both ways. Government should be responsible for designing a communications system reasonably adapted to the world in which its citizens actually live.

In that world, the household mailbox is no longer an orderly inbox of important correspondence.

It is a spam folder.

And no citizen should be required to search a spam folder every day to determine whether the government has hidden something legally important inside it.