I receive a lot of physical mail from HelloFresh and there's no clear way to opt-out. I've never (willingly or knowingly) signed up to their service or any marketing bits.
Would help cut down on the massive amount of waste that is physical spam and help generate profit for the postal service
Most often I encounter people who actually get angry at me for not having a mailbox, call me selfish, call me the unibomber, tell me it is illegal. I still cannot figure out why people get emotionally charged about it.
A short while after I did it, the USPS reported to HUD that my address was vacant, and HUD reported that to the bank that holds my mortgage. This of course freaked them out until I explained to them what was going on.
I was also unable to take advantage of the free Covid test kits that the Federal government said were available to "every family in America". Turns out it was really every family in America with a residential mailbox. Ok, that was my choice, but there *are* still rural communities that rely on general delivery at the post office rather than individual mailboxes.
I do occasionally hit companies who's web app will tell me my address isn't good because it is a business address instead of a residential address. They are few enough though that I can just not do business with them and it hasn't impacted me much.I am of the belief that the offending business must then pay to receive it back. Not really sure if this is true but it does seem to work in many cases since the amount of junk mail I get now is less than one a month.
It seems like Hello Fresh has an agreement with and/or pays USPS to deliver their advertisements, to the point of getting a spot in their emails.
You can't. It doesn't work. (USPS) Most of the junk mail we receive is presort, bulk rate, etc., and there's no return service for it. The letter carrier will reject it and give it back to you. You can throw it out. You can write to the sender (email/post) and request removal from their list.
One problem I get, is that I've "gone paperless" everywhere possible, yet some entities still insist on sending paper mail in certain circumstances. These are very important bits of correspondence, and I can't seem to get across the message that I don't want their paper shit. In one case I've received physical membership cards, and one of them was stolen from my mailbox (somewhere after Informed Delivery scanned it, even.) But they can't administratively prevent these mailings from being triggered.