How to stop junk mail | Hacker News Reader

How to stop junk mail

consumer.ftc.gov

366 pointsuser3939382278 comments

Years ago I completed the permanent opt-out for everyone in my household (needing to mail in a paper form is shameful). However, very few unsolicited junk mails since. For any that get through I call that company's support line and request removal. Works ~90% of the time.

One cool free feature the USPS does offer is Informed Delivery [0]: Every morning around 7am I get an email from the postal service with scanned images of all the mail (face of the envelope) I'm receiving that day.

[0] https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.acti...

I have mixed feelings about unformed delivery as I don’t think government should have scanned copies of all the mail you get. It’s as personal as when we decided that your video rental history was.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

They scanned them before then to route them.

likely transactional data to sustain operations vs retaining the information, which may only happen after opting into the informed delivery service.

They scan all mail already, that's how it gets routed to each home. Informed delivery just has them email you those images they are already taking.

Also in case you were thinking it, they don't open the boxes/letters. It's just the front of it

Well they likely x-ray them too.

They definitely X-ray parcels, for security. Shortly after 9/11, I remember a local post office failing to detect explosives and it getting reported on; this was notable for two reasons:

- one of the hijackers had received a knife through the mail, and it had been processed through that office, so there was extra scrutiny at the time

- a few years prior, that office processed and delivered a package the Unabomber sent that killed someone

Yes, the USPS started scanning packages and letters since the great Anthrax scares. This is just a productization of an already widespread, in-use technology.

The majority of mail screening these days is to find illegal drugs. However, given that so many drugs get through, it seems they only x-ray a small subset.

Not to worry, the government is too inefficient and does not have the technology to convert all that data into anything personalized

Too bad some product manager had to ruin it by adding ads to those emails. Another revenue opportunity and a way to promote USPS things.

I don't think promoting revenue this way is necessarily bad. I'd much prefer this then the cost of postage going up which mandates everyone to contribute to the USPS operating expenses rather than those who choose to purchase products through their ads under their own volition.

> mandates everyone to contribute to the USPS operating expenses

Not everyone; just those that use their services. Which seems like exactly the people that should be paying more if the services cost more.

I cannot for the life of me find the address to which I must send the permanent opt-out form. Did anyone manage to find it?

Opt-Out Department

P.O. Box 530200

Atlanta, GA

30353

Cheers!

I use informed delivery but for some reason they only send me images of about half the mail I'm getting...

For me it seems to omit pictures of junk mail.

Same for me

I just received a legitimate letter from another country and it was completely missing from informed delivery

AusPost seems to offer something like Informed Delivery for post office boxes, but not for residential addresses. I receive so little addressed (non-parcel) mail, this feature alone almost makes it worth getting a PO box, just so I don't have to remember to check my mail box for the once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence of it containing a posted letter.

I was just wondering whether AusPost offered something similar... it's a shame to hear it's not for residential addresses. Almost all of my mail is deliveries of freight from online purchases, so I make habitual use of the locker box and post office collection services. I find them very useful, but unfortunataely for the plain old mail I still have to remember to check the box once every couple of weeks.

Another fun thing you can do is return all prepaid response envelopes empty, to increase the cost of the advertising.

Marketing mail for the USPS is $13.9 billion of their total revenue of $73.1 billion. (19% of total revenue).

The USPS could easily provide a form that let you opt out of all bulk marketing mail.

https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/2062562/junk-mail/

Wow that's... a really simple solution. Never thought to just drop the empty envelopes in the mail. Definitely going to start doing that.

Better yet, fill with glitter first.

I don't think encouraging people to engage in domestic terrorism is a good approach, although as a response to bulk spammers... maybe?

You have a very different definition of “terrorism” than the rest of us.

It was a joke, old sport

The delivery needs work, friend ;)

On HN, we generally prefer comments that aren't just jokes. I certainly like that about HN, I don't want HN to turn into Slashdot or into a typical subreddit. Because of HN's culture, sometimes a joke can be mistaken for a serious comment since we aren't expecting jokes.

HN is just as snarky and closed minded as a heavily modded subreddit, jokes or not.

I am part of "we" and I disagree. Clearly someone was confused at the post but given the upvotes, it was understood. The response, clarifying that it was a joke on my part, was poorly received. Perhaps the correct characterization is that the realization by some users that they didn't get the joke were subsequently more inclined to downvote due to not getting it, or that the meta post acknowledging it was a joke was off comment (but still relevant in the context of the aforementioned subthread) than those that got it, upvoted it and moved on.

If you haven't seen other jokes on HN then consider the possibility that maybe you are overly aggressive in filtering out the human element from this collections of comments, posts & links and are markedly worse off for doing so.

To be fair, enough glitter could definitely trigger a litigious person in the US.

Other than making a bit of a mess, glitter is harmless. I really don’t think that qualifies as terrorism. Though some days, the sheer volume of junk Mail makes me think a hive of rabid bees would be a better response.

> The USPS could easily provide a form that let you opt out of all bulk marketing mail.

They could charge more for it, and let it sort itself.

Why empty?

Because the company has to pay for the return postage but they get no benefit from it. It wastes their time. Kinda like putting the phone down when a telemarketer calls, rather than hanging up.

I worked for a company that sent a lot of junk mail. They had stories of people putting the "prepaid response" on a brick or old shoes.

Let's get creative, folks.

won't that also waste energy shipping a brick? I'd say don't do that, just return an empty envelope which is light and won't increase fuel/energy consumption.

Unfortunately, the USPS now no longer is required to deliver that stuff. It's in their postal codes now.

https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/505.htm

> 1.3.8 Improper Use of Labels and Misuse of BRM Cards and Envelopes

> Improper use of BRM labels or misuse of BRM cards or envelopes should be handled as follows:

> When a BRM label is improperly used or a BRM card or envelope is misused as a label to return an unsealed item such as a brick, two-by-four, or similar item, the Postal Service may treat the item as waste to be disposed of at the discretion of the Post Office.

> When a BRM card or envelope is misused and affixed to a sealed item, the permit holder will be responsible for payment of the applicable Retail postage and per piece fee.

I think this is saying, "Attach it to a box with a brick in it." But neither do I think your local postal worker would be terribly amused.

Just send them their crap back with a "Please remove me from your list!" scrawled across the response. It does actually work, eventually...

I fold up the outer envelope and mail and stuff it into the inner one and send that. They can dispose of their own junk for me.

I don't understand why they allow affixing an envelope to another item, as that's clearly abuse... but since they spell it out so explicitly, I have a hard time reading it as anything else than "attach it to a box with a brick in it".

> Just send them their crap back

After my mom passed I had all her mail forwarded to my house. She donated to a couple of charities, but they all sell their mailing lists to each other so there was so.much.charity.beg.crap with the little trinkets. And a lot of political donation stuff. The charities were pretty all right, honestly. I told them she was deceased and some even offered condolences and took her off. The political stuff, if there was a prepaid envelope inside I would return it with "deceased, pls remove" written on whatever silly survey they enclosed. So they would have to pay a small amount each time I had to tell them to remove her. That took about 2.5 years, but I no longer get anything.

I used to be all about this, but now its just a waste of gas for the USPS.

At least in my area, I have noticed that my carrier has a stack of bulk mail that she grabs and sticks with each person's mail as she puts it in the mailbox. I imagine it would make her job significantly harder if she had to consult a list for each address. Most likely, it would require additional steps at the mail office.

This is called EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) and it's impossible to opt out of it. It's super annoying.

You used to be able to opt-out, but not anymore:

1) opt out with the DMA (note: there used to be an opt-out form at http://www.dmachoice.org/eddm but it no longer exists)

2) each local advertiser has to download the list for your area of opted-out addresses and print them on a facing slip before handing their bulk flyers over to the USPS

3) the USPS has to pass that on to the mail carrier

4) mail carrier has to check the list before putting the (unaddressed) flyers in each mailbox

So many points of failure that you just know it was designed so that the opt-out would not be honored. Then they stopped pretending entirely by removing the form to opt-out a few years ago.

I read a story about Brave's (the browser company) use of EDDM here on HN today:

https://brave.com/usps-mailers/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31622128

The way this is handled elsewhere is putting a "no ads" sticker on your mailbox. The mailman then skips those mailboxes when delivering unaddressed spam.

For a while I would return the whole mailing in the prepaid envelope. I think it eventually worked.

If the post office is a necessary and important service, how does one propose the post office replace the shortfall from halting all this "junk" mail?

Adjust the nature of the service to balance costs and revenue.

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/usps

Here all we have to do is write "no junk mail please" on our mailbox, and the carrier simply doesn't deliver any.

There should be DNS for paper mail. Telling everyone where I live just to receive mail sounds insane in XXI.

I wish I could get a permanent address such as myname@usps.com and get paper mail directed as needed every time I move. Allowing people redirect paper mail to spam could save USPS billions.

What is XXI?

Cringe way to say 21st century

Not necessarily cringe. Some countries (eg Brazil) use roman numerals for centuries.

I’m not entirely sure, but my guess is that it’s shorthand for 21st century.

I interpreted it as post 2021.

MMXXI

He's just showing off that he can buy beer.

> There should be DNS for paper mail.

is that what a PO box is for? You can give out your PO box instead of an address.

unfortunately, the mailing address is sometime (ab)used by parties that also want your real address.

PO Boxes are tied to specific post offices and/or ZIP codes. There are almost certainly hundreds of not thousands of addresses that are PO Box 271 in the USA. What GP wants AIUI is a single mailable id that can be mapped to any delivery point in the area that the USPS serves.

Interesting. Imagine every single person in US register themselves in USPS, getting a "Post number". I'll be PN 1374582347. And I will only tell people "my mailing address is PN 1374582347. And like you said, I can change my address in one place and be effective everywhere instantly!

If actually everyone do this, we will even have an ID number that's not SSN.

> If actually everyone do this, we will even have an ID number that's not SSN.

I had a similar thought but about a bank account.

So apparently the Federal Reserve got into a lot of trouble for just considering giving every person a bank account but what if we actually do it using the post office infrastructure? The post office is secure enough to handle your passport. Why not your money?

Sanders has been trying to build support for the idea for years. It's a great idea, imo.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/bernie-...

They got into trouble not because the idea is stupid, but because many banks will quickly become redundant.

Centralized postal banking is not a new concept and actually is a long-term trend.

Isn’t that like Switzerland’s postal banking service?

I dont trust the USPS to not lose my passport. I always had a bad feeling when placing it in, knowing how many times they screw up on everything else.

Regardless, I dont want the federal government to be even more nationalized. How do I even begin to disagree with the IRS, for example? On top of that, I thought nationalism was bad?

> How do I even begin to disagree with the IRS, for example?

Have you ever had a bad interaction with the IRS? If so, it is probably because the IRS is chronically underfunded.

Anecdotal but among the people I know, the consensus is the people at IRS are very kind. Contrast that with the people at a state, any state, Department of Revenue. You do not want to make those people mad.

In any case, the answer is as I'm sure you know, to get a lawyer.

I am so saddened by comments like these which come from a position of privilege. They don't know nor understand the kind of pain people go through.

A friend of mine can't get a bank account because her father wrote bad checks in her name. She refused to make a police report (he was already in jail).

To be snarky, I have a bad interaction with the IRS every time I get my paycheck.

I also have a bad interaction with them every year when I have to tell them how much I owe them down to the dollar correctly under penalty of law. Failure to do so is also a penalty of law.

Yeah, fantastic experience.

I think you already know both of these things are handicaps forced by the US Congress.

Small savings accounts at your local post office used to be a thing in the US, back in the days when banks mostly catered to wealthy urban customers, and seems to have done elsewhere too:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system>

Seeing the high fees that some banks charge, I'd love to see USPS savings accounts come back as some low-fee competition.

what difference does it make if it is an SSN, PostalID, or any other government issued ID that uniquely identifies you? as soon as one is agreeded upon, everyone will request it for that uniqueID ability. either way, everything will be known by anyone

It's supposed to be the username not the password. The problem is in treating it like some sort of secret.

There are private mail forwarding services that do that https://www.postscanmail.com/services/mail-forwarding.html

True. However then the postal fees are on the receiver. I wish there was a DNS service which would shield my privacy and provide dynamic pricing for the likes of FedEx, UPS, USPS. I enjoy Amazon Prime but don't want Amazon to know where I live.

The durability of postal addresses are hard to overstate imo. You can misspell so much, there’s a lot of info to intent.

Of course there’s not much when the street number is off… but even then you have the name.

I believe in the case of the USPS there’s also a lot of stuff not going into sorting machines either. It’s not all automated

I think you could do PO numbers for lots of stuff of course, and lots of checksumming could be put into place. But I think that for a lot of existing flows the zip code is super important and relied upon, and obfuscating that level of routing would not be worth it for the USPS

> Telling everyone where I live just to receive mail sounds insane in XXI.

This is what I thought too. That, coupled with snow plows repeatedly taking out my mailbox in the winter, and the fact that most junk mail doesn't get delivered to non-residential addresses and I decided to just take down my mailbox and receive all my mail at my work address.

I've been doing this for about ten years now, and it works pretty well. There are some unintended consequences though as many places just assume you have residential mail delivery. The first thing that happened was that six months or so into it, the USPS told HUD that my house was vacant. This led HUD to tell my insurance company. My insurance company freaked out and called me in a panic, but I was able to explain it to them and they made a note. The other biggest issue is that I constantly have companies ignore my 'mail to' address and send mail to my residential address, then get all uppity when it bounces. When I tell individuals that they have to send mail to my work because I don't have a mailbox, they often look at me like I'm Ted Kaczynski. I also can have trouble proving residency to places that want a piece of mail showing my address. The poor credit agencies get all confused, as they can't tell what the heck is going on, and seemingly randomly show my residential address as either of the two addresses. The latest issue was the federal 'every household in America can get free covid tests' program. Well, no. It's actually 'every household with a residential mailbox'.

But I definitely don't get much in the way of junk mail...

I had a driver take out my mailbox a few years back, and I left it down for a few weeks because junk mail was just atrocious at the time. My local post office was not amused, eventually delivering a certified letter saying I was liable to pay a fine and a warning that if the mailbox was not put back up, I'd be fined every month. I understand it from their perspective, since its essentially wasted time and effort. I'm surprised it's possible to get away with not having a mailbox! I will try this again next time mine is taken out.

pretty sure the people paying to deliver the mail would stop paying, so while delivery costs would go down, revenue would drop too...

Before they shut down, Shyp was going this direction. Given your username another person could send you packages without sharing your address.

How about a proxy? Mail forwarding exists

I wish there were a way to list all previous inhabitants of my apartment address who still get mail sent here and somehow tell USPS "no, they no longer live here". I routinely, in both of my previous apartments, receive(d) mail for at least 3-5 people who lived here before me. Many of them important documents, like from the DMV. Yes I know I can "mark" them with a pen/sharpie as having moved, but I don't always bring a pen to my mailbox with me to do that with. There must be an easier way.

I take the effort of marking them "return to sender" and throwing them in a mailbox for outbound mail. I don't know if they actually get sent back, but my hope is that if the important mail gets sent back the org that sent it will try and find their new address.

I've been tempted to buy a rubber stamp with "return to sender" or "not at this address" or whatever. I don't relish the thought of spending money to deal with other people's problems, though.

In any case after a few years I just toss their mail in the trash, junk or otherwise. If they don't care to file change of address forms then I don't care either. I don't think this is technically legal, though.

If it’s second class mail (has a long barcode on it) that does nothing, but it’s also safe to throw away.

Isn’t throwing it away a federal crime?

They don't care about bulk mail, if you try to return it it'll just be destroyed anyway.

If it's not addressed to you at all then you should probably return it of course.

I occasionally receive mail addressed to my mother, who not only does not live with me, but has never even been to the state I currently live in. I assumed this was a chain of horribly mishandled mail forwarding requests the n times I've moved since I last lived with her ~10 years ago.

Recently I got one for my brother, who moved out a couple of years before I did.

Doesn't matter if you mark that mail "return to sender"/"addressee unknown"/"does not live here", or if you report it to the USPS, or anything else you do. They just ignore you and continue to send it anyhow. (At least that's been my personal experience with this exact issue.)

Call the post office. They will typically ask you to put your last name on the inside of your box and then they will tell the carrier to only deliver mail with your name (or ‘Current Resident’ obviously). If you’re lucky, your carrier is nice and respects that immediately. If you’re not lucky, you may have to call the post office every day for a month and complain like I did until they get the point. Eventually that kind of mail stopped.

I’m not sure what they do with all that mail that’s not addressed to me but I don’t really care. The point is I don’t have to see it.

This, along with the other tips in these comments (such as calling customer support lines and requesting removals) means I’m down to literally about one piece of junk mail per month these days.

At least for this current apartment, my last name has already been on a sticky-note attached to the door since I moved in. Guessing the friendly mailman did it. Yet that hasn't stopped the deluge of junk not addressed to me finding its way there (I don't blame the mailman, he's a really cool guy and probably just can't do much about it).

Any piece of mail marked "Current Resident" gets deposited directly to the trash, so if it doesn't specifically have my name on it, don't waste energy bringing it to me.

We get several hand-addressed Christmas cards for people who haven't lived at our address for at least 22 years. I always write "RTS/no longer at this address" but they keep coming.

Billy Woods talks about this phenomenon on the outro of Speak Gently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXFgjQ9dZ8M&t=2m46s

In Canada, you can call or simply add a post it on the letter saying "this person moved". The mailman will reroute future letters.

Apparently there is such a thing as an “employee generated change of address” that can be used to return mail to the sender through the automatic forwarding system.

For rural routes the carrier is supposed to put a card requesting the names of addresses when someone news moves in. I’m not sure what they do with this info but I think they can potentially do something with mail not addressed to your while casing their mail.

I overheard someone being told to put a card in the box about the issue and if that didn’t work to come back and they would enter a COA. But my own post office didn’t seem to know that option and just said to tape a paper on the box door saying “only deliver for X.”

> I don't always bring a pen to my mailbox

My wife had the actually great idea to leave a pen in the mailbox for this purpose. It works really well.

Somewhere in some database, my house is listed as a 12 unit apartment building. I've begged my postal delivery people, the local office, and the regional office to stop, block, or otherwise stop. I've contacted the companies sending the mail begging for them to tell me where they bought my info -- not because I'm upset they bought it, but to find out which database it is. There are no apartments. It's just a house. But almost every day of the week I get 12+ copies of something. Catalogs are the worst since they don't even fit in the mailbox. The postal carrier just drops them on the ground wrapped in a plastic bag.

The fun part is that I can calculate a spoilage rate of the mail. In any day, there's usually 1 random apartment number missing from the stack of 12.

I have a doppelgänger address that causes trouble (US addresses can have N, S, W, and other compass modifiers that are critical to accuracy). Fedex is the worst, as they have a manual override that mostly, but not always, catches the address and reroutes to the correct truck

Other delivery places get mixed up too - the handoff between restaurant online purchase systems and the delivery company (usually Doordash recently) is clearly broken, and shared between many restaurants. That one can send them to an address that actually doesn’t exist at all and maps to the middle of an intersection.

But now we know well the family that gets many of our misrouted packages.

I have no idea which common database needs to be updated to get this fixed - USPS is no help here

> You can decide what types of mail you do and don’t want from marketers. Register at the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) consumer website DMAchoice.org, and choose what catalogs, magazine offers, and other mail you want to get. You’ll have to pay a $2 processing fee, and your registration will last for 10 years.

Is it just me, or is it insanely fucked up that in order to reduce the amount of junk mail you have to 1) first provide your information to yet another third-party site, and 2) pay money.

This is beyond backwards.

You are already paying a lot more than that for the USPS. $2 extra to save myself hours of sorting through mail for the next 10 years is worth it.

That's placing an awful lot of faith in this third-party website doing what it is intended to do, as opposed to other possibilities such as it not doing much of anything at all, or worse yet, exposing your data at some point.

Instead, my approach whenever I receive junkmail is:

1) I write to the sender to request that all of my information be removed from their databases and that I did not consent to receiving any information from them.

2) I file a report with the Better Business Bureau: https://www.bbb.org/file-a-complaint

3) If they have a public-facing presence on a site like Google Reviews, Yelp, and so on, I leave a review detailing that this company sends out spam.

4) And most importantly, I keep a spreadsheet of companies that have sent me spam, and try to avoid ever giving them any of my money or labor.

First, thank you. I’m free riding in the positive pressure you’ve exerted.

Does it work for you? Do they stop, and is it worth the time?

Also, do you go through all four steps at the “first offense”? Rightly or not it’s considered business as usual to blanket a geographical area on occasion, so there are only a few places which are constant enough I’d actually consider myself vengeful instead of annoyed.

> Does it work for you? Do they stop, and is it worth the time?

Actually, surprisingly yes! After doing the above for several years, I now get virtually zero junk mail (according to my spreadsheet, I've only received three pieces of junk mail so far this year).

And yes, I do it on the 'first offense' to nip it in the bud as soon as it starts.

Most of the functioning of the US government at every level (city/state/federal) relies on private third parties doing the heavy lifting. In some cases it is visible to you up front (like this one), otherwise it is just happening behind the scenes. A blanket "I don't trust third parties" stance means you have to live a completely self sustained lifestyle off the grid.

> A blanket "I don't trust third parties" stance

Except this is not a blanket stance, but a very specific stance against the specific third-party in question: dmachoice.org, which states that they may use information they collect about you for digital advertising:

> Information gathered by cookies or similar technologies may be used for our business purposes such as analytics, research, digital advertising, and operational purposes. [1]

[1] https://www.dmachoice.org/static/privacy_policy.php

Sorry, but I'm not paying $2 to replace physical spam with digital spam.

> I file a report with the Better Business Bureau: https://www.bbb.org/file-a-complaint

Ah, the boomer/"greatest-generation" version of something like Angie's List. I used to believe in BBB too, until I realized it was just another middle-layer scam, sitting between businesses and consumers, with time-varying ideas over who should pay to either (a) get information (b) control information.

The International Association of Better Business Bureaus is listed as a 501(c)(6) and their EIN is 83-3454617 but they don't provide any links to their financial reports or required filings on their website and trying to search for their Form 990 comes up blank, even on the IRS website. But I'm sure they're totally legit...

All the shady behavior that Yelp has been accused of, but largely never caught doing, various state level BBB's have been caught doing.

It beggars belief that Yelp has gotten away with it. I have heard from 4-5 restaurant owners the same story: it costs $300 to hide bad reviews. Those that don't pay start getting more bad reviews.

> It beggars belief that Yelp has gotten away with it. I have heard from 4-5 restaurant owners the same story: it costs $300 to hide bad reviews.

Is there documented evidence of this available? Emails with DKIM signatures, recorded conversations with representatives who can be confirmed to work for Yelp, official Yelp correspondence, etc? Basically anything that can actually make a solid case instead of just anecdotal evidence.

Nope. What I have been told is it is always a phone call shakedown.

Random call, I am not sure if they followup. Suffice it to say, AFAIK no one has managed to record the shakedown calls.

The BBB is a protection racket. You're wasting your time on them.

To clarify: I treat the BBB as a review site, to peruse before engaging in business with another business, to see what people have said about them.

The racket is BBB members can get bad reviews removed.

Doesn't your argument against using the third party agency DMAchoice apply just the same to the BBB?

That sounds a lot more complicated than taking a chance and paying the $2 to see if it works. If it doesn't your method works as backup.

us public: ubm is making us miserable

FTC: pay this company no one but us know about $2 and it will fix the problem for 10 years in no legally binding way and with no government oversight penalty or enforcement.

Given the USPS is the one doing this, it feels like running a state or national campaign on just regulating an opt out feels extremely doable.

Hell, maybe you hate the post office? Great way to punish it!

I've done this, but most of the junk mail I get is from previous residents of my home, even though I've lived at my present address for over 3 years now. I've called some of the frequent mailers and had some success. Others have impossible to find contact info.

I've talked to my letter carriers, and it will get better for a few weeks and then be back to normal.

I'd say I get 3x the mail for previous resident than I do for myself. It's frustrating. Would be great if USPS just had a form I could fill out that automatically stopped delivery for certain names (and gave that info back to the mailers so they could stop generating the waste).

Go do a change of address on the USPS website for the previous residents. Costs a dollar or so per last name

Only lasts a year, though.

Maybe setup mail hold for however long they allow, then sort it just once that time period (maybe once per quarter)?

Yes but it also adds an entry to a mail list update dataset that USPS sends out. I worked at a company that had a magazine and every month USPS would send a CD with an updater. I never looked into how the technology worked but it allowed a sender to auto update their database to the new address.

Per the form:

> The person who prepares this form states that he or she is the person, executor, guardian, authorized officer, or agent of the person for whom mail would be forwarded under this order. Anyone submitting false or inaccurate information on this form is subject to punishment by fine or imprisonment or both under Sections 2, 1001, 1702, and 1708 of Title 18, United States Code.

I decided to stop checking my mail for three months to see what would happen. Eventually, they just put a little thing in my mailbox indicating that all mail would be returned to sender. That was fine with me until my family kept telling me they couldn't send me cards and such, so I went and resolved it with the post office. If not for that, I'd be completely mail-free in my home.

EDIT: I do get substantially less junkmail now though, so some of these organizations may have come to the conclusion I no longer live here.

My mailperson wrote on a scrap of junkmail in sharpie to start checking my mail more

All of my very necessary™ professional™ mail goes to my PO box, which I also don't check very often.

Did you end up checking your mail more often?

I haven't checked my mail in 2 years. Its great.

What do you do about jury duty notifications? (If you live in the US)

It would get returned to sender and I guess they'd assume you are no longer there? They can't do anything if you never received notice.

“Sharing your Social Security number and date of birth is optional, but the website says that giving this information can help them ensure that they can successfully process your request. It says the information you give is confidential and will be used only to process your request to opt out.”

“The website says”? How wonderful.

It didn't even accept my social security number complaining that the number was too high...

Let me guess: it’s more than 2^31-1 or 2^32-1 if converted to a binary number?

I had a PO box that I kept for my side business. Never really used it other than to have it as my address, but I received so much junk. I had to go in and clean it out every week. If I didn’t, I’d get notices from the post office. I finally asked them stop putting in all the junk in my mail box. They said, I’d have to call them individually to stop.

That’s when I realized, the post office actually makes money from doing this so they have zero incentive to stop.

Exact opposite for me, I use a pobox, because they won't put junk in there.

On a related note, I've been using Catalog Choice[1] for years to unsubscribe from unwanted catalogs (which for me is all of them). It's free and I find it's quicker and easier than figuring out how each company's opt-out process works.

[1] https://www.catalogchoice.org/

For Canada Post[0]:

To stop getting unaddressed advertising, simply put a note on your mailbox stating that you do not wish to receive Canada Post Neighbourhood Mail™. Place the note in or on your mailbox, or on the inside lip of your community mailbox, group mailbox or postal box.

[0](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/kb/rec...)

In Australia, thankfully this is as straightforward as a sticker on your mailbox with ‘No Junk Mail’ and/or ‘No Unaddressed Mail’. Since installing one if those stickers, the amount of waste coming from my mailbox has dropped off probably 90%, with the only unwanted letters now coming from politicians who pull my name and address from the electoral roll to mail out their campaign stuff.

how is that junk mail enforced? Do the post office check that the mail isn't junk first? Or is it just a placebo effect?

Two different ways, most junk mail sent via the post office is unaddressed, and so it is in legislation that these are not to be delivered to houses with the stickers. The other is the usual paper boy who has been given a bundle to distribute, these are partially on the honour system, but there is a complaints system for companies that ignore them.

If the USPS offered a subscription service where they throw trash away instead of stuffing it into my mailbox, I would pay it with a smile on my face. I don't even care that it probably meets the definition of a protection racket.

The tradeoff is that you can mail anything anywhere in days for extremely cheap. Mail is cheap because of spam mail.

I don't mail anything. I've considered removing my mailbox altogether.

While one can increasingly do a lot of things electronically, there are certainly documents that governments send that expect a valid mailing address. And may have legal consequences if you don't respond to them. I receive a number of local bills for example that I'm not aware of an electronic option.

Yes, I also ultimately decided to keep the mailbox.

You cannot run an online business relying on location services (e.g. Google My Business) without a mailing address to send a verification post card. Many states also require a mailing address to send a driver license. Many countries require a mail address for an online national id (e.g. https://www.realme.govt.nz/ in New Zealand).

In a time before electronic bank statements, I had a long back and forth with my bank trying to put a stop to receiving any or all of my accounts' paper statements and eventually just claimed that I moved out and no longer had an active address to update my accounts to.

They threatened to close all of my existing bank accounts if I couldn't provide a valid mailing address, and then made me verify it when I gave them the same address they already had.

Whether it should be the case or not, it's hard in the US not to have a legit residential address--and workarounds not involving "living" with someone you don't may or may not work. It doesn't help that state residency actually matters for reasons of taxes and ID.

Awful tradeoff.

I’d rather pay very slightly higher taxes to subsidize mail if necessary rather than having the USPS be self-sufficient as a spam expediting services for businesses.

I'm with you. Ignoring the inconvenience of sorting through junk mail every day, just thinking about the energy required to move all that trash to people's mailboxes, only to then be thrown in the trash and moved to a landfill, makes me itchy.

i think it goes to recyling, not a land fill.

honestly it takes me < a minute where I get to chill and see what's on offer. 1/100 times i might even not think of it as junk.

the problem with you people is you're

1) spoiled out of your minds 2) lazy as fuckkk

Well as you know in the US, taxes are a mortal sin. 0 chance that will ever happen. So we are stuck with junk mail.

Elsewhere in this post it’s noted that spam is something like 20% of USPS revenue, perhaps less than expecrsdy

Sure, that’ll be above $100 a month to forward directly to the landfill

https://www.usps.com/manage/forward-premium.htm

USPS offers a subscription service to their official permanent move database.

USPS is like Facebook. They make more if they don’t allow premium opt outs.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/08/how-the-p...

I’ve done all of this multiple times. It got better for a couple of months and then started again. The same senders. Real estate agents, coupons, houseware ads… I’ve even written “return to sender” and my post person wrote “you can’t just decline mail” and dropped it back in my mailbox.

I’m so sick of this.

Wrong.

“Domestic Mail Manual (DMM), Sect. 604.8.1.2 and Sect. 507.1.8.2 provide two instances where mail can be refused when it is offered for delivery, or, after delivery. You may mark “Refused” and return it unopened within a reasonable time.”

https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...

I’m going to get real petty about this. Thanks for sharing!

I tried getting petty and submitting complaints to Postmaster General. Eventually they told me if I kept refusing mail, especially the Direct Mail that advertisers use (to Current Resident), they just wouldn't deliver my mail anymore.

Junk mail can be refused.

https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...

Send it back to them. Make it their problem.

My post person wrote “you can’t just decline mail” and dropped it back in my mailbox. I did write “return to sender” on it. I even tried writing “return to sender. Declined by receiver”.

I wrote to the postmaster general. Nothing came of it.

(Note, I get really petty about this stuff)

My solution is like said above: return it to sender. If your post person is trying to keep it your problem, make it USPS' problem: when returning to sender put it in a postbox that your post person can't gate-keep.

I've personally had pretty good success with this, albeit it does require consistent effort for a while.

Yeah; put it in a post box, period.

If they have a personal (outgoing) mailbox that they are putting just the one piece of mail into, the mail person can skim over it, see the marker, and make decisions.

If it's a post box that is filled with a bunch of people's outgoing mail, no postal worker is going to read over it that way. Further, if you've blacked out the 'to' address with a marker (as I do), and written 'Return to Sender', they then are faced with either returning it to sender...or treating it as a dead letter that is undeliverable. They won't do the latter if there is a sender they can return it to, ergo...back it goes.

Yeah this is a good idea. Going to drop it off at a friends outbox.

I really wish I could just end USPS mail entirely. 99.9% of my mail is junk, the small percentage that isn't is something I'm already aware of via email. I've tried stopping junk via this site before, it didn't seem to change anything.

Mail is still an important service to be able to contact someone at a physical location

You can end your mail service, I've called and asked about it for this exact reason. After the world's most resistance, shock, and awe, and a level of escalation, I was eventually told that yes this is possible but that nobody had ever done it.

So how do you do it?

Normally you can't broadly stop someone from being able to send you mail. However, there is a loophole.

You can file a PS Form 1500[1] and say that the advertisement you received from them made you horny[2]. No questions asked prohibitory order.

1. https://about.usps.com/forms/ps1500.pdf

2. https://about.usps.com/publications/pub307/welcome.htm

Comments like this are why I read hackernews. I'm going to be very horny this month, apparently.

Exactly my thoughts! I saw a seemingly boring headline but opened it anyway expecting gold. I was not disappointed.

Postal services have funny laws that are often way more serious than you'd think - I'd worry that by lying on a form like this you're committing a much more severe crime than you realise.

Who said anything about lying?

> Title 39, United States Code, Section 3008 authorizes the Postal Service™ to issue a prohibitory order against a mailer who sends you an advertisement offering to sell any matter that you, in your own discretion, believe to be “erotically arousing or sexually provocative.”

> you, in your own discretion, believe to be “erotically arousing or sexually provocative.”

If you don't genuinely believe it to be this, and are just using it to get out of junk-mail, then you're lying on an official form.

It's actually pretty easy to induce a Pavlovian response to just about anything. Neural plasticity and response conditioning are on our side here.

Who is going to litigate that lie? How could one prove it to be false?

> How could one prove it to be false?

You ask a judge or jury to use their common sense. Were you aroused by a pizza coupon? No, obviously not.

It's current year, no one is allowed to question anyone's sexual preferences.

If you're not aroused by the thought of pizza, you're ordering from the wrong place. https://i.imgur.com/jkeKAxK.jpg

getting sent to horny jail by the post office police would be a hell of a thing t have on a dating profile

Prob would be horny federal prison since it would be a federal crime.

There is no lying, though: the law (39 U.S.C. § 3008) leaves the decision about whether mail is a “pandering advertisement” to “the addressee in his sole discretion,” which avoids the First Amendment problems that might arise if the decision were reviewable by a government official, who would then be acting as a censor. It’s been upheld by the Supreme Court; see Rowan v. United States Post Office Department, 397 U.S. 728 (1970), in which the Court held:

      Both the absoluteness of the citizen’s right under
   §4009* and its finality are essential; what may not be
   provocative to one person may well be to another.  In
   operative effect the power of the householder under the 
   statute is unlimited; he may prohibit the mailing
   of a dry goods catalog because he objects to the
   contents—or indeed the text of the language touting the
   merchandise.  Congress provided this sweeping power
   not only to protect privacy but to avoid possible
   constitutional questions that might arise from vesting 
   the power to make any discretionary evaluation of the
   material in a governmental official.

* Later renumbered to § 3008.

Bill collectors turn me on.

That value pak of coupons does it every time ;)

Seriously this is a good point to know. Thank you for sharing.

Apparently you can unsubscribe: https://www.valpak.com/coupons/show/mailinglistsuppression

Anything sent to "Current Resident" can't be blocked by a Form 1500. I've tried. They say that since it doesn't have my name on it, it's not actually meant for me specifically so any prohibitory order I try to file will be rejected.

Anyone here besides me who finds some of the unsolicited postal mailings useful?

A Valpak [1] mailing had a coupon for $500 off from the roofing company I had already decided to use for my new roof. They usually have coupons for several other things I occasionally need, like oil changes, garage door maintenance, and food.

Burger King, Wendy's, and Arby's mail something every few weeks with coupons that usually include a few I find useful.

The stuff I don't find useful doesn't come in sufficient volume to be too annoying. The walk back from the mailbox and up my driveway is 100 ft (30 meters) which gives me plenty of time to look through the mail and separate out the the useless stuff by the time I reach my recycle bin which is at the end of that walk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valpak

I’ve never found anything useful in 15 years of living on my own.

The roofer is one thing, but I wonder how much Burger King, Wendy's, and Arby's might be able to reduce the cost of their food if they weren't spending money shipping paper to everyone's house all the time.

I guess a lot of people use coupons. But I wonder how much money is actually spent running these campaigns, and how much of the paper ends up just being tossed. I don't even open the flyers, they go straight to the trash.

They’re not interested in reducing the cost of their food though, they just want to charge the most that enough people will pay. They keep advertising and couponing because they test areas they advertise and don’t and measure the difference, and it costs less to advertise than they gain in sales

Is that leafy paper even recyclable? I used to start the fireplace with it and it melted more than burned

While I chuck a lot of stuff in the trash, sometimes without even opening, I don't have this magical ability that many here apparently do to distinguish between complete junk, potentially interesting, important, an organization I occasionally support and will glance at an update from, etc. Honestly, dealing with mail I don't want is so far down my list of concerns and annoyances that it really doesn't register.

I've done this and it makes a big difference, but I still get a lot of junk from local businesses. Either those businesses are not part of the DMA, or they are ignoring the opt-out list. I'm not sure what to do about it.

I've done this as well. Another issue I've noticed is that when a certain item is set to go to "all" addresses, the mail carrier will simply give one to everyone until they run out. This is probably right most of the time. But I would consistently get junk mail for my neighbor with an apartment number one higher than mine.

I recall reporting this to the USPS multiple times without any effect. The only thing that helped was putting a note inside my mailbox to check for my neighbor's mail.

I just Google the business and email them. Usually they're able to take me off their mailing list.

Also as I recall, there was a coupon mailer that did not participate in the DMA. The flyers show up with branding from Vericast/Save/Valassis. The opt out for them is here: https://www.save.com/mailing/delivery-options

Similarly I recently moved houses and got a ton of catalogs to the former owner. It was a PITA to get sorted out, but after a couple months of diligent removal requests my mail is mostly stuff I care about.

I wish there was some equivalent of credit card chargebacks for USPS bulk mail. If I mark the mailpiece as being to someone not at the address, the USPS would bill the company for the failed delivery. (Also the "Or Current Resident" loophole is ridiculous.)

Then this would be the organization's problem to keep their own lists up to date. I realize this is probably infeasible but it would be nice.

From what I understand, local businesses can make an arrangement to send out mass mailers at a bulk price with their local post office. Maybe you see it as junk but I can see why being aware of whats available as far as the local economy (while helping keep the post office afloat) may make those mass mailers (assuming I’m making the right connections) “not junk.” Jmo though

Local businesses just give the post a bunch of shit to drop at every address. Your and my post person doesn’t give a shit about our opt outs. They’ll deliver this to everyone. I’ve tried man. I’ve lost hope at this point.

> but I still get a lot of junk from local businesses

> I'm not sure what to do about it.

What I found to be particularly effective when dealing with spam from local businesses is to contact them directly and request that your information is deleted, while also posting that they engage in unscrupulous practices like sending junk mail on public review sites like Yelp and Google Reviews, and then finally filing a BBB complaint directly against the business.

A lot of businesses these days aren't registered with BBB, which makes them ineffectual. That's more of a past thing, as I'm finding out. Mostly older businesses, or businesses run by older people are the ones participating.

The post office literally provides a service to advertisers that you can't opt out of. If it is addressed to Current Resident or something similar, then it is most likely USPS Every Door Direct Mail. There is no opt-out.

As a matter of principle, I am not paying a $2 "processing fee" to stop people from sending garbage to my mailbox.

Also, the permanent credit card offer opt-out requires me to print and send a letter from each address I live at. This is clearly designed to be as annoying as possible so nobody does it.

1.6 cents per month seems pretty reasonable to solve what would otherwise just consume some of your time. An ideal world, there wouldn't be a processing fee but we don't live in that world.

Aa far as the credit card opt out, you can also freeze your credit and I believe that has a similar impact since no one can make unauthorized inquiries.

You can mail the junk back to the sender at their own cost.

If you make it cost too much to send to you, they stop on their own.

It takes about 5-7 months

How do you mail it back to sender at their cost?

Do not open it, and write "return to sender".

This is untrue. For the cheapest classes of mail, (e.g., "bulk rate") it is not returned, it is discarded.

It is true.

I shred those bulk mailings, but I was referencing the many Junk but non-bulk class letters I receive. It makes no sense to write return to sender on a bulk-mailer.

While much Junk mail is sent via bulk rate, Junk in this context refers to the content not to the mailing class of bulk.

Some have a prepaid envelop for your response.

I’ve done both and it was worth it. Highly recommended.

One can also consider a mail processor if you’re nomadic or on the road often; you give out that address, pay $10-$20/month for the service, and they dispose of the junk mail and scan in only paper mail of importance for review.

Edit: will return with mail processor recommendations when not mobile.

Any recommended country or US state specifically?

Have a couple remote operations this would be useful for

Not the OP, but I've been using St. Brendan's Isle[1] for about a year and it's been great. I've also heard good things about My RV Mail[2]. Both are in Florida, I think mostly because it's a popular state for full-time RVers to establish as their domicile -- no income tax, low vehicle licensing fees, etc. I looked at bigger name services like Anytime Mailbox and Earthclass Mail, but found a lot of complaints about reliability, hidden fees, etc. in the reviews. Many of these services contract with local businesses (like convenience stores and independent shipping shops) to actually receive your mail, so your experience could be great or terrible depending on the address you choose. St. Brendan's Isle and My RV Mail both handle all mail in-house.

[1] https://www.sbimailservice.com/ [2] https://myrvmail.com/

That is the one I recommend for personal mail and use, as you can establish domicile with them as you mention. Also, their address doesn’t throw any flags with brokerages and other financial services providers as a commercial mail processor.

Any that you recommend or know of?

> As a matter of principle, I am not paying a $2 "processing fee" to stop people from sending garbage to my mailbox.

I feel like that must be relatively new. I swear I used that site and I'm pretty sure I didn't have to pay a fee.

I bet they added it to discourage people from going through with the process.

A $1 authorized charge would work for a little bit of "real person here" verification, but I'd imagine the $2 is to discourage auto-filling an entire town's worth of people via a script; all you'd need is, say, a voter registration list to get the necessary info of name and address.

They could confirm the address you are requesting with the billing address on the card.

This is what the '$1 authorized charge' is for when you submit the address change/mail forwarding request.

I get shit loads of junk mail at my second address, which is not the billing address for my credit cards. They have to have a way to deal with that too.

AVS chokes on apartment numbers pretty regularly.

I kinda love that they're offering PayPal Credit as a payment option. A six month loan for a $2 purchase?

How much of a credit boost does $0.33/month give you?

Under the hood, it's a credit card; you'll get a credit line much larger than the $2. How it impacts your credit depends quite a bit on how many other accounts you have, and for how long; a thin, short credit file will be more heavily impacted by a new account.

I paid my $2 processing fee two years ago, and I now seldom get any junk mail period.

Best $2 I have spent in my life.

Here is the link to opt out of credit card offers. https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

Ever since the Seinfeld episode where Kramer decides he's going to opt out of mail after receiving too many catalogs I've wondered why you can't do that.

Governments will contact you primarily via the USPS. The IRS, the local court, etc. Also, it's a viable method of serving a suit. If you could opt out of USPS delivery you lose a pretty secure and reliable channel of official communication.

It would be nice to opt out of all bulk mail and non-first-class mail, etc though.

Well, you can opt out of mail, but that usually means opting out of living in a building that you own or rent. I'm thinking specifically of people who live on a boat or in an RV year round.

Is there anything you can do for landline spam calls? Or spam texts? My family is inundated.

Pick up the phone and then immediately hang up. That will often times tell them that the line is dead.

Pick up the phone and ask them to put you on a do not call list. Surprisingly that works for some of these.

Pick up the phone and fuck with them. “911, what’s the location of your emergency” is my standard greeting no matter who calls me. Or tell them you are a Jehovah’s witness and as them if they’ve heard the good word.

Tell them this is a cell phone and your state allows up to $$$ per phone call if you take them to small claims. This usually works well with asking their full name and the name of their company and the name of their supervisor.

This is what I have done (for car warranty):

Want to get warranty for a horse carriage

Want to get warranty for a 1930s Model T

Want to get warranty for a future 2023 car

Want to speak to Kate when the person calling is Cathy. No no no I really want to speak to Kate.

Want to ask if they can call me at a specific time rather than random so that I know it is them

Max talk time has been 10 seconds. I wish I had the skills to prolong the call.

>I wish I had the skills to prolong the call.

You could start by giving them more realistic car details.

I engaged them one time when I got really annoyed. Gave fake car details (but realistic), call back number of local McDonalds, and then kept asking for details about the coverage. I eventually declined it and the sales agent got super pushy with scare tactics so I hung up.

Complain to your Congressional representatives. There's action being taken, but it's slow; a big provision kicks in at the end of this month.

https://www.fcc.gov/spoofed-robocalls

> Caller ID authentication is critical for protecting consumers against spoofed robocalls where scammers mask their identity, harass consumers, and seek to defraud vulnerable communities. Caller ID authentication, based on so-called STIR/SHAKEN standards, provides a common information sharing language between networks to verify caller ID information which can be used by robocall blocking tools, FCC investigators, and by consumers trying to judge if an incoming call is likely legitimate or not. On June 30, 2021, the FCC confirmed that all the largest voice service providers had implemented these standards in the IP sections of their networks, in accordance with the FCC’s deadline. While some small carriers were afforded an extension of this deadline, Chairwoman Rosenworcel shortened the amount of time afforded to a subset of small voice service providers based on evidence that they were originating an increasing quantity of illegal robocalls. Thus, small voice service providers that are not facilities-based must implement STIR/SHAKEN in the IP portions of their networks no later than June 30, 2022.

That "small voice service providers" loophole is what's currently abused; a few of them have found being lax on spam detection means they can rake in fees for a while.

https://epic.org/documents/scam-robocalls-telecom-providers-...

> Every answered scam robocall pays money to those providers, as well as to every telephone service provider in the call path. Even when these providers are told—sometimes repeatedly—that they are transmitting fraudulent calls, they keep doing it, because they are making money from these calls.

Not the ones that have fake caller id. Those guys aren't in america, and are completely untouchable by the law. It's a real problem.

agreed. i'm in a wave of people leaving me voicemails telling me to never call them again. there's more than one victim per call for these guys.

The law could be amended so that your telephone company has to provide you with the true originator info. Then people could collectively block organizations adblock-style, or even block anything outside the US and be done with it.

I got rid of my landline. 100% effective.

It's not 100% effective. Although junk calls and texts to my cell phone in the US are pretty infrequent these days.

Disconnect the landline.

For mobile turn on do not disturb with only contacts or favorite contacts allowed to breaktrough. Aggressively respond with a stop word to incoming texts - that eventually clears your number out of marketing databases.

Call your senators and representatives. Tell them to treat robocallers like terrorist.

I just stopped checking my mail.

I don't need it. Who needs it anymore? I get all of my bills via email, I can be contacted by anyone who wants to get a hold of me in very easy ways like email and phone, and the only thing I get delivered are packages, usually I get notified when they arrive.

I just don't see a reason to go check for mail, the only things I'm getting are junk.

In my case I did the credit card opt-out and then targeted the two worst offenders (Comcast and Chase). I believe Comcast I was able to opt-out both my house and PO Box from their endless stream of junk, Chase was harder had to actually call them but was successful in removing all my addresses from getting their checking account offers. (the optoutprescreen only seems to stop credit offers, not all banking product offers).

I don't want to opt-out DMA opt-out because there's a couple monthly advertiser services that do send useful stuff.

The remaining worst offender I can't get rid of so far is Andersen Windows & Doors. The mail started pretty banal, moved up to 'handwritten' estimates that looked like they were done with an autopen. The last few mailers look more like scribbles from an insane person. Pretty sure next will be notes wrapped to bricks thrown through my current windows.

> Pretty sure next will be notes wrapped to bricks thrown through my current windows.

Hew they do windows & doors you know!

> Thank you!

> The following is a confirmation of your Opt-Out request.

> In order to complete your Permanent Opt-Out election, you must print and mail the Permanent Opt-Out Election form.

what was the fucking point of this

Edit: my opt-out was for 5 years. The "Permanent" opt-out requires mailing them.

lol

USPS is completely overrun by garbage mail.

I don't care much about junk mail in envelopes. I don't get that much, and it's easy to toss.

What I do care about are those !@#$%^&* newsprint bulk ads that I get every few days.

I have allergies, and I play harmonica, so my hands are often close to my face.

If I just touch that stack of newsprint long enough to toss it in the recycle bin, my hands stink after that. I have to use a combination of soap and isopropyl to get even a fraction of the smell out.

I realize that the USPS makes money delivering those newsprint ads. Whatever they make, I would gladly pay twice that or more to never get one again.

Does anyone know if the DMAchoice thing would stop the newsprint ads? I have a feeling it wouldn't, but would be delighted to be wrong about this.

I opted out of those and they stopped coming. Mine came with opt out instructions I assume because of a law, so yours probably do too.

I was looking for this website again for junk mail. It looked so sketchy the first time, but I’m gonna bite the bullet and see if this saves me time over the next ten years from having to throw away junk mail. $2 is worth the experiment.

I did this many years ago. 99.9% of my mail is still junk, just junk where I have some sort of weaselly pre-existing relationship with the company sending mail. ("You donated money to us! Can we have some more!? We spent it all on this marketing campaign and now it's gone!")

This used to happen to me (in Montreal, so perhaps not the same as your experience) with SPCA. I emailed them and told them very politely that I donate on my own schedule, that I appreciate the work they do, and to please stop wasting their (my) money asking me for more donations. They replied thanking me for the e-mail and saying that they had removed me from their mailing list.

This is why I stopped donating to KQED.

Any online order or phone order is an automatic opt-in to their catalog. I used to let my wife handle her own mail and I handled mine, but it got so out of control that I saved all her garbage for 1 month and showed it to her, and now I'm allowed to opt her out of everything. Took a few months but we finally got it down to the bare minimum. It's nice. If I miss a day or two of checking my mailbox, it doesn't overflow!

Do you still get the traditional junk mail though? I heard this trick specifically from a postman at USPS and decided to act again given I found the link again.

Every time I check my mail (which is about once a week), I have about of pound of paper to recycle. These are all things like catalogs from places I've ordered, charities I've donated to, "you used your security key to log into Vanguard!", and things like this. It's all junk to me. I shop online, so don't need a paper catalog. I'm well aware of the charities I donate to and have a recurring donation setup. I was there when I logged in with my security key.

But yeah, pre-approved credit card offers are gone, which is nice.

I just signed up as well. Curious whether it will make any difference.

You cannot optout of USPS services like Every Door Delivery Mail.

https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm

This won't stop the local ads the delivery person is required to put into every box.

There should be a legal way to mark your box (on the inside etc) that advertisements aren't allowed.

But who are we kidding, this entire country was built on abusing every possible ad space except the backs of the congresspeople.

If ads are allowed under "free speech" then forced eyeballs are not a valid method, it has to be contracted and your mailbox is not a contract with sellers. Just like that TV you bought has no right to show you ads without consent.

Honestly, it used to be far more of an issue when going away for more than one or two weeks at some times of the year resulted in a mailbox full of stuff--meaning you really had to get your mail held. These days I find far fewer catalogs--and certainly thick catalogs--get sent.

I did get a larger mailbox, mostly for packages. And I still get a fairly high junk to organizations I do business with to actually important mail ratio. But I can mostly ignore my mailbox for a week at a time easily.

I never understood why you're allowed to just send as much mail as you want to people that didn't ask for it. The particularly egregious letters are labelled as important and with time sensitive information. We already have rules about how things need to be labeled and packaged to be shipped, so I think it could also be useful to have some system around colors or labels to clearly distinguish actually important or personal mail from marketing

The equivalent for Swedish residents:

https://www.statenspersonadressregister.se/master/start/dina...

Free and permanent unless you opt in again.

I don’t see the point of giving up more personal privacy, just to beg some org that we have no control, for some mercy that they may take back anytime they want.

Are we encouraging them to send us more junk whatever, and then charge us more for their spareness? Is there really end of this game, if the rule is in their hands?

Most junk mails don't bother me. A lot of them are just neighborhood businesses. But, some are clearly mistakes. Such as my own credit card company keep inviting me to apply for a card I already have.

I also think the bulk mail rate should be higher so businesses will be more careful when doing direct mails.

Suppose I move and have a new address. Is there any way to stop new mail? Catalogs are easy enough to stop. I'm thinking things like political mailers. It's almost like you need to keep your name out of public records (DMV, voter registration, property title) to avoid them.

A better solution could be to get a PO box from a company that can open & scan your mail and use that address for anything important. Then you don't need to care about your physical mailbox and can let it fill up forever.

I love junk mail. Sometimes there’s a coupon worth a fortune!

I get an insane amount of junk mail in my building, it's a shame. Security ended up creating a junk mail box we can dump stuff in as soon as it arrives.

In Japan and France, at least, people sometimes put stickers on their mailboxes: "no ads".

It works pretty well, but I wonder if that does anything for the USPS.

For us Canadians you can “opt-out” by just putting a note in/on your mailbox. The carriers will/should honor that.

I keep getting "Error: Credit card expiration date is invalid."

I've tried this several times, hasn't worked once.

Probably works just as well as the do not call list.

I’ve been doing it for years and it works. I get almost 0 junk mail. The 2-3 per year that slip through I contact and ask them to remove me.

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