A recent article on Sightline Daily titled “Going Postal: A Year of Junk Mail” chronicles one man’s 365-day experiment with advertising mail. For an entire year, Alan Durning stockpiled every piece of standard mail that landed in his mailbox. Durning also signed up for Catalog Choice and DMAChoice and took other steps to stem the tide. The results? Durning reports that he still received a two-foot-tall stack of unwanted mail weighing 50 pounds. Nearly half the weight was phone books and neighborhood advertisers. Take heart, Catalog Choice members! In the months ahead Catalog Choice will be adding ways for you to remove your name from other forms of mail, including phone books, coupons, and credit card offers. Read more about Alan Durning’s unwanted mail adventure here and let us know about any mail experiments you’ve tried at home!
In the last 31 USPS delivery days (July 1st through August 6th), my partner & I have received four pieces of unwanted mail. at our street address & a P.O. Box combined.
Two of the four pieces were catalogs from the same source; we contacted the sender immediately upon receipt of the first and requested that my partner’s name & address be removed from their mailing & lease lists.
And those other two pieces of unwanted mail? Gotta love those PS1500 forms!
Catalog Choice is a wonderful service. Junk mail has disappeared at our house. CC managed to finally get Dell to quit sending their paper spam, and even Wissota Trader now apparently honors requests via Catalog Choice. It took several CC tries and a ‘nastygram’ email from this irritated former customer to them but they finally got the message that they were wasting paper and postage, and had permanently lost a customer because they wouldn’t honor requests to discontinue the paper deluge.