Everyone still gets paper mail, or snail mail as some like to call it. There seem to be about twenty pieces of postal junk mail to every legitimate piece I get so I got to asking myself, how do you stop junk mail from being delivered? After all, none of us go out and sign up for junk mail, right?
I say reduce because I have never found a way to remove all of the postal junk mail as there are too many small mailers simply mailing to every address in an entire town, this includes a lot of the “occupant” mail you get.
After a lot of research, some trial and error, and asking a lot of questions, I found some really interesting ways that I could substantially reduce the amount of postal junk mail I receive. Below are some of the things I found.
1: Use the return mail envelope
A lot of postal junk mail, particularly from credit card companies, political parties, and non-profit groups will have a return mail envelop that has the return postage paid. Use this envelope to send them a note telling them to stop remove you from their lists. This does two things, it lets them know you want off their list, and that you don’t mind costing them money to make it happen.
I will make one note here, I only do this to postal junk mail from non-profits that I have a distaste for. Too often the term non-profit is used to simply say “after paying our CEO an enormous amount of money, we have nothing left”. I would never do this to what I call a real non-profit like the ASPCA, World Wildlife Federation, etc.
This can take some time because they have to get the postal junk mail back and then process your request so it is not unusual to receive more mail from these people for weeks after using this method.
I like this method because it literally costs them money every time you do this so they are motivated to keep you from doing it over and over again. Even if they really don’t care, it is satisfying knowing that they are in a way getting billed for my time dealing with their postal junk mail. This is about the only way I have figured out how to stop political junk mail, and it doesn’t stop it all.
2: Opt-out of credit card and loan offers
You may have noticed that a large percentage of your postal junk mail is offers of credit or loans. What you may not know is that the vast majority of these offers are mailed using a mailing list from the major credit bureaus and that you can keep all of them from including your information in those lists by filling out one form that takes you about two minutes of your time.
How can you stop this type of postal junk mail? Run over to optoutprescreen.com and fill out the form and you can opt-out of receiving this type of postal junk mail for five years, or download, print out and mail in a form to make it permanent. You will need your name, address, social security number and date of birth to complete the form. Personally I just do the five-year form online and then set a reminder to do it again in about four years so it overlaps.
If you change your mind you can go back to the same website and opt back in which takes about the same amount of time. Then you can start receiving all of that glorious postal junk mail again!
Note that since you are completing a form that is sent to the credit bureaus, who then remove you from their lists that they provide to people who want to make you offers, this can take months before you notice a reduction in the amount of postal junk mail you get from credit card and loan companies.
3: Return to sender
Some mail can simply be marked as refused, or return to sender and stuck back in your mailbox. This also will cost the person who sent you the postal junk mail to have it returned to them. It can be a lot of fun thinking of all the spam being returned to the person who spammed you to begin with.
Note that only some types of mail can be marked this way and returned. To find out if it can, look for some of the following hints:
- return service requested
- forwarding service requested
- address service requested
- change service requested
- First Class Mail
My understanding is that if the postal junk mail has any of these markers on it then you should be able to have it returned to the sender. If none of these phrases appear on the mail, you may need to use other methods in this article to stop mail from this company.
Unfortunately, I have never figured out how to stop third class mail delivery, and asking around I don’t think there is a way.
4: Opt-out with the Data & Marketing Association
A good amount of postal junk mail can be opted out at the Direct Merchants Association, they claim that they represent 80% of the total volume of marketing mail in the United States. Intelligent businesses know that if you don’t want their mail, sending it to you anyway is just going to make you less likely to buy from them. Following that logic, the DMA helps companies clear their lists of people who absolutely do not want to receive their postal junk mail.
There are two downsides here. First, the DMA does not represent everyone who sends postal junk mail, and second, they can assist you in contacting companies that you have already done business with, but they can not stop those companies from sending you postal junk mail.
So why can’t they just stop everyone? Because the rules are different for existing customers and potential customers. For existing customers, you have to deal directly with the company in getting your information removed from their mailing lists. That’s just the way it is.
To have the DMA remove your information from all the lists they can you simply head on over to dmachoice.thedma.org and sign up for an account. Be warned that they will want your email address (and you should not use your real email address, as I mention in my article on stopping spam email) and it will cost you $2 for them to process your requests. This is probably the best way to get rid of junk mail.
5: The last mile
If you are doing all the methods in this article then you should have massively reduced the amount of postal junk mail you are receiving. If the statistics on the websites of the groups we have been using are to be believed, you should have reduced your standard marketing email by 80%, your credit card and loan offers by around 90% as well as been removed from the majority of any non-profit and political postal junk mail.
That last little bit is probably two things; companies you have done business with, and those coupon sheets. Let’s hit them both.
The first is companies you have done business with before, and they are the toughest ones as you have to contact each one, one at a time, and asked to be removed from any and all mailing lists. I usually specify that I want to be removed from any lists and not contacted in any form, at any time, for any reason. This covers phone calls, text messages, emails, and postal junk mail.
While that is time-consuming, it is also usually pretty straight forward as these companies already have you as a customer and know that it takes a lot more work to get a new customer than it does to retain one, so they are usually pretty good about honoring your wishes.
I have recently noticed a trend however that seems that some of these companies are losing sight of this. I recently contacted a Victra, a Verizon Wireless authorized retailer where I bought my phone. I was unhappy because they started spamming me with texts and I wanted them to stop. It seems the manager I finally made it up to was under the impression that spamming his customers was not only okay but “standard business practice”. He also made no effort to stop the spamming. Guess who I am not buying any more phones from?
The second part, those little coupon packs, can be addressed using skulocal.com and RetailMeNot to let them know that you prefer not to receive any postal junk mail from them. Do you wonder how to stop getting circulars in the mail? This is it.