Eliminating Junk Mail

Eliminate Junk Mail.

Junk mail represents a major security issue. Credit card offers, financing offers, catalogs, and sweepstakes announcements all present their own issue, and while some are more serious than others in terms of credit protection, you don’t have to settle for receiving any of them.

Whatever your reasons for doing so, reducing the volume of junk mail you receive takes very little time, and the benefits cut across the board.

What Doesn’t Work: “Return to Sender”

The U.S. Post Office makes huge revenues from junk mail. In fact, in 2005, the USPS processed more junk mail that First Class mail for the first time ever. Simply writing “Return to Sender” at the top of an envelope and throwing it back into the mailbox doesn’t incur any additional cost for either the post office or the original sender; the message in question simply gets thrown away, as per postal regulations. The post office’s main obligation is to the mailer, as they are the ones paying the bills.

What Does: List Removal Services

Unfortunately, there is no government-sponsored program for junk mail like the National Do Not Call List, a service created in 2003 to stem the flow of unwanted telemarketing phone calls. There are other resources, however, at least one of which is dedicated to protecting customer credit: optoutprescreen.com, a joint venture between all three major credit reporting firms as well as a fourth, Innovis, which is much smaller and deals primarily with real estate transactions.

Credit agencies provide lists of potential customers to credit card companies, allowing those solicitors to send credit offers on their own, without customer approval. However, the agencies must provide consumers the means to strike their names from these lists, and signing up at the Web site above fulfills this function.

You have two choices for opting out: you can do it for five years by simply signing up on the Web site; or permanently, which requires printing out a form from the site and mailing it in. Credit card companies maintain that very little identity theft actually occurs because of prescreened offers, and some evidence shows they may be right. But the less exposure your critical information receives, the better protected your identity will be.

Stemming the Catalog Crush

Besides credit card offers, perhaps the most pernicious and frustrating junk mail are catalogs, which take up both mailbox and landfill space. As more shopping moves online, these catalogs are less and less necessary, becoming just another thing to throw away and pollute the environment.

About 80% of sales correspondence comes from members of the Direct Marketing Association, an organization of about 3,600 companies that engage in mail, email, and other targeted forms of marketing. DMAchoice is a free program developed by this organization designed to reduce unwanted customer correspondence. Signing up for this service allows you to opt out of certain kinds of mail—credit offers, catalogs, magazine subscriptions or other deals—and to limit what companies are permitted to contact you. (Although choosing to limit credit offers simply sends you over to optoutprescreen.com, the service described above.)

Sweepstakes: Potential Land Mines

Registering to win a sweepstakes is possibly the best way to get your name on at least one, and probably many, marketing mail lists. The best way to avoid such a thing is to avoid entering these contests. If you already have, visit the big sweepstakes companies online—Publisher’s Clearing House and Reader’s Digest are among the biggest—and request that your name be taken off their lists.

Other Opt-Out Services

Some companies, particularly those you’ve done business with in the past, will continue mailing you catalogs and other material even if you register a DMAchoice account. You must contact these companies directly and ask them to remove you from their mailing lists, if you wish to be removed.

In addition, there are other direct marketing firms that manage and sell consumer lists. Valpak, Valassis, and R.L. Polk are a few companies that sell information to thousands of businesses, and contacting each one will remove you from more mailing lists, thus reducing your volume of junk mail even more.

Of course, all of these steps take time and effort. If you have the financial means to do so, companies like 41pounds.org charge very little to contact dozens of direct mail companies in order to stop junk mail sent to you. Their service lasts five years, and only costs $4l, or about $.70 per month.