You hate mail of any kind? Really? Even letters from family? Postcards from vacationing friends? Cash payments? Victoria's Secret catalog? That's really hardcore.

Even letters from family? Postcards from vacationing friends?

I thought the last person who used mail for that sort of thing died off a year or two ago.

"Postcards from vacationing friends?"

That's crazy! Computers don't go on vacations!

i like mail. it makes me feel special.

i actually like to force companies to mail me bills as well. makes me feel like they are putting forth some effort. plus the system that tears open envelopes and processes checks is hella-cool, so no need for that to become a fossile, replaced by floating bits and bytes.

@catbutt: I agree they did. I think it was a Tuesday, many people don't know that.

What may be lost on some is that those detailed bills are required by some companies accounting departments is you expense your cell phone charges. This is as much a PITA to deal with as you can imagine, and no one is actually reading the bills, but the rule is there.

"...but at least the trees don't mind."

But think of the silicon and the electrons being wasted! Doesn't anybody care about them?!?

I usually take all my junk mail and put it all back in to one of the pre-paid return envelopes offed from some of the junk mail jerks.

Comedy gold.

ATT and others should discount our bills by $1.99 for choosing the paperless billing option. Yes, I like saving trees, although not so much hugging them, but ATT also saves big $$$ by not having to print and mail all those bills. Automatic billing? Again, they save $$$ by not having to manually process paper bills and checks. All these expenses were accounted for and are reflected in the price of their service plans. Now it's pure, clean cash for them. ATT is going green for sure, they're rolling around in all that extra green! Pay up sucker!

This is also an option customers can set online, and apparently choose during activation.

You can set this option online, as I have, but there's no such choice during activation. I just activated two iPhones last night and it never asked about paperless billing. Maybe that's something new and coming soon.

Hey... $1.99 for toilet paper ISN'T that bad of a deal!

@coyotejoe: Meh, silicon is the most prevalent compound on the planet making up something like 60% of it's crust, just visit any beach (although refined silicon is a very labor intensive problem at the moment we still have plenty of "base" material.)

@axiomatic: Classic! I'll be doing that henceforth.

I never use paperless billing, even in an insane situation such as this. When dealing with companies with a moral track record as bad as our cell providers, I want evidenc in paper. Because I'm quite sure I'll have at least one showdown with them per year.

If there is erroneous or fraudulent information on anything that is mailed to you across state lines, there is the option of pursuing interstate mail fraud (or something like that). You don't have that option if it is emailed.

IANAL and just read that somewhere - not sure if it would work tho, but interesting...

It would be so easy for ATT to fix this and still give us detailed billing. The hundreds (in my case 27) pages of detailed billing was for every single data connection the phone made. If you just condensed that to total data minutes and left the detail for phone calls and sms, you'd have a bill that was at least 90% shorter and none of us would complain. I think this is in part based on the fact that I be no one at Apple or ATT actually gets a bill for their phone. I suspect it just gets paid by the company so they never had to encounter the problem.

@AXIOMATIC
YES

I usually take all my junk mail and put it all back in to one of the pre-paid return envelopes offed from some of the junk mail jerks.

@AXIOMATIC

on second thoughts - DO NOT send your junk mail anywhere.

some tOrd will apply for finance on your behalf and have way more info than they need....

We need some machine to recycle this junk mail into toilet roll - much better than shredding.

tek elements, that's just crazy. huge numbers of people who work for AT&T get their phone bill every month just like customers do.

And though there have been a few articles and postings here complaining about the detailed billing (and rightly so), for the most part, corporate accountants and picky customers demand it in larger numbers than other customers revile it. A shorter paper summarized bill should be an option though, just like everyone is suggesting.

and i also wouldn't send my junk mail to anyone else - those bar codes on letters and envelopes tell what address it came from.

The lady that got one of the 300 page iPhone bills, was on NPR yesterday. When the host asked her what made her bill 300 pages long, she said it was a record of the 30,000 (yes thirty-thousand) text messages she sent/recieved that month. As an AT&T customer, I hate to defend them, but what did she expect?

BTW cingular has had a paperless option for quite some time now.

@dreux36:
WOW. 30,000 text messages! That's like 1000 text messages a day, 41 messages per hour, or about 1 message every minute or 2--ALL FREAKIN DAY LONG!

Now I assume that this person sleeps about 8 hours per day, so that's at least 2 mesages every darn minute of the day or more!

and i though my 6000 was a lot.

wait is this that lady person who won the text messaging contest who can type supercalifragilisticexpialidocious the most quickly?

some people need to put their cell phones down and have a real conversation.

@redrum:

No, IIRC she had an iPhone so there's no way she could type extremely fast.