I like to buy stuff online when I can. And in fact, I buy lots of stuff online.

My latest purchase is a voice modem. I still have DSL so it’s not for the blazing fast 52k connection speed that I could get over my phone line. No, it’s so that I can record telephone calls.

That’s right, if you call me, you might just get recorded. Not because I don’t like you, but because I’m tired of the pre-recorded telemarketing calls that I’m already getting. Now I’ll be able to record the message directly to my hard drive and capture the Caller ID information along with it.

More on that later, but my latest online purchase is a voice modem. It’s a $75 purchase and is getting shipped to me via the US Postal Service. It’s not the first time that I’ve gotten something shipped via the USPS, and when I have, I’ve used their Email Update tool to keep me apprised of the status of my package by sending mail to my GMail account. So, I’ve done that with this one, too.

When I got my first notification, I noticed something I hadn’t really paid attention to before: “USPS has not verified the validity of any email addresses submitted via its online Track & Confirm tool.” This shouldn’t be a problem. After all, they won’t let you set up email updates until they’ve first found the tracking code in their database. Presumably you don’t really want some random stranger to know where your packages are. Finally, you cannot send any data using their form, so it’s not really attractive to spammers. That just leaves the odd typo.

But, that’s the problem. Search as hard as I could, I couldn’t find anywhere that I could tell the USPS that I didn’t want any more mail about this delivery. Of course, I do want delivery, but suppose that someone had made a typo. Even if it is only 3 or 4 pieces, it would be nice if I could tell the USPS that they’re sending to the wrong place and please stop.