Long before the Internet made porn easily accessible, there were "Smut Vendors."

And like any small-business owner pre-Instagram, they had to reach you through your mailbox.

Which means as you sipped your coffee and opened up your morning mail, there was a pretty high chance someone had mailed you porn. Usually in a nondescript envelope. Complete with an order form for more if you would like. But, frankly, even if you did not like, the porn still kept coming.

Needless to say ... the post office got a few complaints.

How to stop a '70s Smut Vendor

In November 1970, a national program was announced that would roll out to all local post offices. According to the Dallas Morning News archives, the idea was that smut vendors "must purchase the list [of people to stop sending advertisements to] from the postal service." And if the vendors continued to send porn, residents could notify the post office and the vendors would would face "a penalty of up to $5,000 fine and-or 5 years in prison." The penalty doubled for the second offense.

The roll-out was initially slow. The law went into effect Feb. 1, 1971, and the post office mailed out reminders and forms letting Dallasites know about the new rule. But according to a Feb. 23, 1971, article, "only 800 Dallasites out of 19,000 notified [had] asked the Post Office Department to keep sexually oriented smut out of their mailboxes."

By that August, those numbers had picked up slightly across the county. A Dallas Morning News editorial declared the law a success as "complaints against obscene mail [had] dropped 41 percent" and "200,000 Americans [had signed up] on the no-mail list."

Fun fact: Your grandparents also received mail porn

This was not a solution to a new problem. Articles in The News archives dating to 1904 discuss the post office's adventures in interpreting obscenity laws. A 1939 article examined whether the local post office should pull a magazine featuring a nude Matisse painting. A 1940 article about the "unprecedented number of obscene Christmas greeting cards on sale" that year necessitated a warning from the Dallas postmaster that sending dirty Christmas cards could get you thrown in prison.

But according to James "Jim" Collins of Dallas, a member of the House of Representatives at the time, 1970 was a particularly profitable time for porn. "America is in the midst of a smut explosion," he said.

A post office power trip?

Not everyone was a fan of these laws. An Associated Press article published in 1959 said that "critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union and book publishers" found the idea of your local post office "decid[ing] for itself whether material is obscene" troubling. "The post office tramples on freedom of speech and of the press, and, in its zeal, too often mistakes a classic for a French post card."

But what did the actual post office workers think? When The News interviewed Tom Miller, the assistant postmaster in Garland, about his thoughts on the law in 1971, Miller said he "wishes the law had been reversed so that people who wanted smut mail delivered to their homes could come in to sign up."

"It would be easier on us."