TLDR: Use 200 miles to redeem magazines to extend miles another 24 months.
I have quite a few Alaska miles expiring end of month and I was looking for the cheapest way to extend for another 24 months and wanted to share my findings.
The obvious solution is to simply buy 1000 miles for ~$40 AUD. Another play, which I now use is to redeem miles for a magazine subscription. The cheapest redemption offered is 200 miles (or 100 miles +$3). Considering Alaskan miles are worth 1.8 USD cpp (2.5 AUD cpp), that works out very cheap. The activity appears immediately in your account and extends your miles for another 24 months.
After the redemption I was a little cautious because ‘milesformags’ claimed that once they had validated my account information, they would process the redemption. But since you can only redeem for physical delivery of the magazines to an address in the States, I figured there would be a mismatch of my MP account address and the street address I gave to Milesformags. But after clarifying with a MP agent, they do not have access to your account address so the ‘validation’ is irrelevant. And even if they didn’t honour your redemption for whatever reason, whether they returned the 200 miles to you or not is also irrelevant from an ‘activity’ perspective according to the MP Agent.
If you don’t have a legitimate address or friend to send the mags to in the States, buy some karma and send them to an organisation in need or somewhere they would be useful and most welcomed.