Eliminate nonsense mailing to your house: My story & you can do it too!

This has nothing to do with IT but this is well worth posting!!!  I was SO HAPPY!!!  Last night I contacted one of the many community organizations that send junk to my mailbox via the contact us page on their website.  This isn’t your typical junk mail from a major retailer or coupon book either, it’s from a Public Skewl (misspelling on purpose!).  They kindly got back to me and said they can’t stop sending it to me because their publication is sent “delivery route“.  I guess “delivery route” means they don’t put an actual address on their mail they just give a pack of 500 or so to a particular mail route and the letter carrier just gives them to each mailbox along with the real “junk mail” although this publication is in fact REAL JUNK.  As a tax payer I don’t particularly enjoy the fact that our public institutions take the time to print and mail this out to “the community” thinking that everyone in the community actually cares about the contents or what’s going on at the institution.  Please note public institutions, if I want to know; I know where to find you!  Also, it’s inefficient, wasteful and costly to keep printing on paper and mailing it out to every one of your community members.

I suggested to this organization they simply upload the document on their website and offer it freely to anyone wanting to download it, they can FaceBook it, Tweet it, make an e-book Kindle version…whatever they want just STOP the unsolicited invite to my mail box and please stop wasting time, money and effort.  I also suggested that if the few technological stragglers who want the paper copy “demand” they have it in that form they should PAY for it.  It’s far more costly to distribute the paper than uploading it to a website.  Receiving something like that in the Postal Service Mail is a LUXURY not a right.  They can put it right on the cover, “Last paper issue unless you do xyz to continue service”.

So how do you STOP nonsense mail and junk from being delivered to your doorstep?  Apparently it’s “law” they give you the option UNFORTUNATELY it’s not law that they tell you about it until you poke around.  I wish everyone knew this information which is why I’m posting it here.  It’s certainly in the USPS’s interest to keep this a secret :p

USPS can take you off the “common mailing list” just:

Visit the website (www.dmachoice.org), signup, validate your account and select what you want to get or not get from the USPS.  A note here, when you do the Credit Card one you get the option of just stopping it for 5 years or FOREVER (<– Great option!!!) but once you do the “forever” stop on the credit card offers you have to actually mail in the signed form to them so definitely print off the form and send it in or in 5 years you’ll start getting them again.

or…

Write to:
Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
PO Box 643
Carmel, NY 10512-0643

I’d like to also note that a nice feature of the site is to “report” a magazine or publication that hasn’t stopped coming to you so after 90 days if you’re STILL receiving the junk mail you can report it and hopefully someone deep within the bowels of the government will slap them with some unheard of penalty, fine or super secret mass marketing torture tactic in a dark room far beneath any prying eyes :p

If this helped you like I’m sure it’s going to help me feel free to let me know and tell others how to beat the junk mail in their real mailboxes.  Don’t tolerate it any longer!  If you don’t take proactive measures to stop the junk it’ll only get worse.

Rafael Wolf
Director for The Center of My Own Opinion