De-Cluttering Your Mailbox

De-Cluttering Your Mailbox in a recent TIME Magazine has tips on keeping snail-mail spam out of your mailbox. That's a green thing to do, since "paper spam eats up an estimated 100 million trees each year, with 44% of junk mail ending up — unopened — in landfills." Transporting junk mail to your mailbox and those of millions of others wastes gasoline by the tankerful. And I pity the poor postal workers who have to sort the likes of PennySaver and carry it to every mailbox in the United States, every week.

ProQuo.com can help you opt out of credit card solicitations, catalogs, coupon mailers, sweepstakes announcements, etc., etc., etc. You sign up for free, activate your account, then opt out of junk mail sources one by one, at your discretion. Some of the junk mail sources accept an immediate electronic opt-out which ProQuo generates for you. Far too many, though, make you mail in a form letter which ProQuo gamely feeds you. Then there are those irritating sources that make you leave the ProQuo site and enter their own ... where you have to figure out what to do on your own, with no further help from ProQuo.

As for catalog opt-outs, ProQuo ideally lets you just click on a catalog you want to stop receiving, fill in some vital information (including your customer number, so it's best to have a catalog in hand) and send the opt-out right away. If you don't know the customer number, you can so indicate ... but you get the feeling the catalog company may just toss out your request on the basis that they "can't find" your identity in their database. For that matter, there seems to be no law that any company has to honor any such opt-out request, no matter how complete the information you give them.

ProQuo has a paltry list of catalogs it knows about — though it lets you suggest new ones — so I found it better to go to CatalogChoice.org, where the list is huge. This is another free site, and the procedure is similar ... though the sheer number of catalogs makes locating one you want to cancel harder than at ProQuo. CatalogChoice ideally has gotten each catalog's sender to agree to honor opt-out requests in advance, though two of the three I tried to opt out of were shown as not having entered into such an agreement. CatalogChoice will still send these catalogs your opt-out request (including your customer number and/or source or key number if you know it) but there are no guarantees that the request will be honored. CatalogChoice also provides links to these nonparticipating catalogs' customer service and privacy pages so you can try to cancel them one by one the old-fashioned way. As with ProQuo, catalogs not in the CatalogChoice system can be suggested for future inclusion.

I haven't tried it, but the TIME article also mentions the pay site GreenDimes.com, which will charge you $20 per year to do the same kinds of things.

The article says 89% of poll respondents support the creation of a national Do Not Mail list that would be like the successful Do Not Call Registry, which bars commercial enterprises from phoning you out of the blue with their solicitations. So far, in none of the 19 states where such an initiative has been debated has it passed, owing to the fact that mail advertising works. The 56% of junk mail that does not go unopened gets enough consumer response, it would seem, to yield an estimated $646 billion a year in sales! Some of that lucre undoubtedly finances powerful lobbying that keeps state legislatures and the U.S. Congress from killing the goose that lays all those golden eggs.