Since I pass our trash can on the way back from the mailbox, I can stop, tear up and then toss all the stuff we do not want, including ‘Time’ magazine, which someone cozened my husband into subscribing for 5 years ago.  We cancelled the subscription, but ‘Time’ comes regularly, and I regularly toss it.  Usually it never makes it into the house.  Back when we had paper recycling, Id toss it in the paper bin.

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Ugh, I got that exact same cheap crucifix one! The letter was like, “You should donate to us because God is watching over you with His grace and His angels.” I was like, Well, you’ve just made sure I’ll donate to someone else, and you’ve sent this little plastic cross necklace to the landfill. Good job.

What we need are outdoor, all-weather, solar-powered shredders. These can be mounted next to the mailbox and you can instantly shred all the crap.

I love junk mail that solicits for money and includes a prepaid reply envelope. It amuses me greatly to take the entire mailing and fold it up (sometimes origami techniques are required), scrawl “Remove Me From Your Mailing List!” across it with a black sharpie, put it in that prepaid envelope, and mail it back. This is threefold fun: 1) They ALWAYS remove me from their future mailings, immediately; 2) I don’t have to throw it in MY recycle bin; 3) It helps to add revenue to the USPS and contributes towards my hard-working postal carrier’s salary. Bonus Point: I once received a snotty letter as followup, chiding me for doing this. Alas, they did not include a prepaid envelope that time, which shows that they can, in fact, learn from the experience.

I just pitch the stuff, don’t even bother with shredding it.  We don’t get any actual mail, other than bills, anymore, not through the Post Office; all of our mail comes via e-mail these days.

Of course, my habit of just discarding anything that looks like junk mail could have been expensive: I got something addressed to my website and was about to pitch it, when Elaine said, no, and opened it; inside was a royalty check for over $700!  It was so out-of-the-blue that I thought it was a scam.

Wonder if I’ve pitched any other little nuggets?

You gotta stay on top of the mail every day or two. Sorting out weeks of junk mail is too horrid to contemplate.

I reduced the number of catalogs that arrived by registering at http://catalogchoice.org/ It’s .been over a year, though, and many new catalogs have been coming in recent months. I need to start putting those aside so I can register my wish not to receive them. Yesterday’s mail had about 10 catalogs, so that’s a good start!

Related peeve: Despite having my home and cell phone numbers on the Do Not Call Registry, more and more junk calls have been coming through lately. And of course they have hidden or fake numbers, so I can’t even report them to the Do Not Call people. Grr! The worst is when I’m driving and the cell phone rings, distracting me from my driving responsibilities. How long before a telemarketer breaking the Do Not Call law causes a fatal car crash?

Also there’s something kind of hilarious about reading a spam comment on this post. 

I just do a quick sort every day or two right when I pick up my mail, most of which goes straight into the recycling.  The worst for me is the packet of special deals and coupons that comes 2-3 times a week.  It’s about as much paper as the local newspaper, all ads, all unsolicited, and it always goes straight into the recycling.  Such a waste of material, although as the child of a postal worker I suppose things like that helped keep me fed and clothed growing up, so maybe I shouldn’t be too irked!  You do have to stay on top of it though.  All that junk piles up quickly.

What we need are outdoor, all-weather, solar-powered shredders. These can be mounted next to the mailbox and you can instantly shred all the crap.

...and empties into a composter. That is a really good idea. I hope somebody builds it!

I like to send them envelopes filled with cornstarch and a short note explaining that it’s Holy Jesus Powder blessed by Sarah Palin’s witchdoctor and they should sprinkle it over themselves to improve their sales figures :D

Speaking as a former CSR for companies that send mailings like these, adding the privacy codes to an active account for ‘no mail’ & ‘no calls’ is instantaneous. The ‘up to 6 weeks’ for stuff to stop arriving line is a CYA measure, because calling lists & flyers for promos really are prepared several weeks in advance, and we couldn’t unmake the ones in progress at the time of the request. Unless the rep doesn’t place the work order at all, or does it wrong (which is a whole other can of worms), it can’t get lost. Done right, it’s in place before you hang up the phone.

It’s a big frustration for me too.  It just makes me not want to subscribe to any magazines or give to charity unless anonymous.  It should be illegal to sell your information without your knowledge.  One thing that helped me a lot was writing to the credit bureaus and asking not to receive any prescreened offers.  This lessened the junk mail a lot.  But I subscribed to Mother Jones magazine a year or so ago.  All of a sudden I started getting all manner of solicitations for other magazines and from a few of their sponsors.  I tried to find a place on the website where I could complain.  Finally had to call them to get off the list that they sell.  By then my information had already been sold several times.  It makes me afraid to subscribe to a magazine unless I call them up ahead of time to let them know not to share my information!  Unlike banks, they don’t have to send you a privacy notice with information on opting out.  You just all of a sudden start receiving crap before you know what happened.  I also signed up for the Mother Jones “green” option which means my subscription automatically renews and bills my credit card unless I cancel.  This was, incidentally, to stop me from receiving constant junk mail reminding me to renew.  Then what do i get a few days ago?  Junk mail asking me to buy subscriptions to my friends.  Yeah right.  I like the content, but their business practices piss me off. 

And then there’s the fact that any time I buy ANYTHING from a company that has a catalog, I get inundated with catalogs.  What a freaking waste.  I buy online.  The charity stuff…i don’t even know where that comes from.

I opted out of receiving credit card offers; there’s a site here for that. I think I may have received a few from my current bank over the last year, but the CapitolOne etc. offers stopped pretty much immediately. There’s also a helpful MeFi thread over here, though I haven’t tried their suggestions. Something there might help out your catalog situation.

Do paper catalogs, etc? still provide postage-paid envelopes for your orders and money to be mailed in?

I’ve always been fond of the poetic-justice aspect of stuffing the envelopes with all the junk mail that will fit and sending it back postage due, although I’ve never been pissed off enough to try.

Charities and political organizations are exempt from Do Not Call or Do Not Mail lists.
As for the catologs, most have a check-off (usually on the order form) that you can fill out and send back postage paid.  I used to get 10-20 unwanted catalogs per month - I took the time one month and sent back the forms (some can be done online) and haven’t heard from any of them in at least 2 years.

My apartment building the smart thing and put trash cans by each of the mailbox centers.  There are weekly coupon packs that get sent out to everyone in the area, no matter what, and the trash can is always full of them. 

Sometimes I’ll get something and wonder how I ever ended up on their list.  I have subscribed to game magazines (like sudoko and crosswords), scientific magazines, and bought from a few catalogs.  Yet recently, I got a catalog for motorcycle stuff, and another one for Wiccan stuff.  I’m not surprised when I buy from a clothing catalog and get a tidal wave of other clothing catalogs, for example.  By why is a motorcycle catalog buying names from a game magazine mailing list or something?

I actually don’t mind getting the charity ads, because they often include something useful, like return address labels.  I’ve never gotten a cheap crucifix though.  There are some charities that I willingly donate to, but I don’t need mailed out ads to know about them.  If getting something in the mail is the first time I hear about charity, I’m suspicious to give anyway.

I get tons of credit card offers all the time, and I never bother to open them.  I have a stack near my door where they pile up until I shred them.  When they’re so eager to give give credit to people randomly, it’s no surprise that credit companies have been failing so badly.  When I was a teenager, I worked part-time for a collection agency, and one of our clients was a clothing company called Blair, that works primarily through mail-order.  Eventually I got a catalog from them, offering my pre-approved credit, even though I was only 17 at the time.  I thought that maybe they wouldn’t need to hire the collection agency so often if they actually had some standards about who they extend credit to.  Now that I’m an adult and I have a credit history and great credit score, I get offers daily.

The Sierra Club got on my shit list a while back when, after I donated some money to them, they sold my information to a bunch of nonprofits.  I hope for their sake they got a lot for my name and address because I will never again donate to them.  I’m also tempted not to donate to those orgs that bought my info:  I’m looking at you, Doctors without Borders and MADD*.

Whenever I get an unsolicited credit card offer, I tear up the application, stick it in the envelope, and mail it.  If those bastards are going to waste my time, I’m going to waste their money.  It really burns me when I get a “preapproved” offer and they don’t have my legal name.  I’ve seen them put my last name as my first name, which I suspect is a way for them to get around the opt-out option.  There’s no way you can predict all the new and original ways they’ll mangle your name.

*Actually, I can’t stand MADD anyway.  It really does figure that they’re unethical enough to engage in those practices for fundraising.

I shred it and throw it into my composter.  The worms eat it, or maybe it just dissolves from all the wet.  I’m not sure.  It goes away somehow.

Here’s what I do sometimes when I’m just really fed up with them…  I take non-identifying junk mail from company/organization A, and then I stuff it into the prepaid business reply envelope that came with the junk mail from company/organization B, and vis-a-versa.

I’m sure that accomplishes nothing whatsoever, but it gives me a chuckle thinking about the reaction they have when they open up the mail they paid for and it’s filled with junk mail from some other company.

If the junk mail is 8 x 11” sheets only printed on one side, I add it to my scrap printer paper pile to be used to print out paper drafts, googlemap directions, etc. 

Everything else goes into the shredder and dumped into the paper recycling bin.

the best crazy religious organization “freebie” that I ever got in the mail was a paper “prayer rug” that you were supposed to “run on affected parts of your body” and mail it back to the scam organization that sent it with “a minimum tithe of $20” and shortly thereafter the HEALING CAN BEGIN!

My mailbox is right by my front door so I grab it all on the way in from work and shred and/or read the catalouges while I’m waiting for dinner to cook.
Never make the mistake of ordering kids slippers for yourself if you don’t have kids. You really do end up on useless lists. It’s amazing how much people will pay for a 4 year old’s dress though. Dang.

uh - “run” should read “rub” sorry about that.

For me, the biggest thing was the neverending credit card offers.  It turns out it’s easy to opt out of most of those; the credit agencies maintain a site for you to do it (www.optoutprescreen.com).  This only stops credit card offers from companies that you don’t have cards with, however; I called AMEX and got them to stop sending me crap, but I still get infrequent offers from Wells Fargo (who I do have a card with).

Lately, the biggest annoyance was that once I registered online to vote in my county, apparently they share my email address with every politician who asks, so I started getting unsolicited email like Gavin Newsom for Governor, and city council candidates.

Apparently the Direct Marketing Association also has an opt-out program, though they actually expect you to pay them to opt out ($1), and it doesn’t stop bulk mail from non-DMA sources.

You could consider leveraging existing federal law on some of the junk mail. Below is how the Utah Atty General web site describes what law you can use (it was a quick google find, you can find more with more searching). I am including the references to the specific statutes that enable recipients to issue a demand that they not be sent pornographic materials. But read the second section I quote below the ellipsis, on Federal law 39 U.S.C. 3008, which gives you the power to stop offensive material, which is any material you believe to be provocative.

Frankly, most magazines and advertising circulars now have become so free in their sexually provocative use of photography, if you want to try this route, it becomes a no-brainer. I still remember a few years ago visiting friends who had a teenage daughter, and picking up and flipping through the teen oriented magazines lying around the house. Trust me, I felt I had to go no further to find all the soft core child porn and lessons on “how to be ‘ho’” I could ever want.

Companies obey these laws, by the way, they can face severe financial punishment if they ignore these orders once filed with the USPS.

http://attorneygeneral.utah.gov/854.html

The government cannot prohibit unsolicited mailings. Such an act would be a violation of an individual and a company’s right to free speech under the First Amendment. However, the government can regulate the following four things:

  1. Sending obscene material through the mail (18 U.S.C. 1461);
  2. Distribution of pornography (76-10-1204 U.C.A.);
  3. Mailing material with indecent pictures or words on the wrapper
    or envelope (18 U.S.C. 1463); and
  4. Continuing to send material after you file a prohibitory order (39 U.S.C. 3008 and 3010).

...

Federal law 39 U.S.C. 3008 gives you the power to stop offensive material, which is any material you believe to be provocative, from being mailed to you. The Supreme Court said you can declare a “dry goods catalog” to be offensive and prohibit its delivery to your home. Rowan v. United States Post Office Department, 397 U.S. 728 (1970). The post office must accept whatever you classify as offensive, even if they don’t believe it is sexually oriented.

  * File a Form 1500, Application for a Prohibitory Order (section one of the form). You can download a free, printable copy of Form 1500, pick one up from your local post office or ask for a copy to be mailed to you by telephoning a major post office in your area. It is a very short, simple form.

My father always used a different (wrong) middle initial for everything he subscribed to, so he could track who was selling his info from their mailing list.

I know someone else who lives in a single family home and puts apartment numbers after the address to do the same thing.

Then again, my sister had herself listed in the phone book under the cat’s name (unlisted costs extra, but you can be listed free as whoever you want), and she STILL gets mail and calls for the cat. (She always took joy in saying “I’m sorry, he can’t come to the phone.”)  They’ll figure out a way somehow.

Orange wrote:

Related peeve: Despite having my home and cell phone numbers on the Do Not Call Registry, more and more junk calls have been coming through lately. And of course they have hidden or fake numbers, so I can’t even report them to the Do Not Call people. Grr!

Whenever the phone rings and I don’t recognize the number, I answer in Russian.  My friends know it’s me, and unsolicited calls just go, “Excuse me?”  I then tell them, in Russian, that I don’t speak English.  They hang up. 

This trick might not work with Spanish, but just about any other language ought to do.  Wonder if I should learn Klingonese?

Maybe I’m naive, but why do you need to shred all your personal information from every piece of junk mail? I don’t care who knows that TimeShare Inc. mailed me a blind pitch for a condo in Florida. The only junk mailings I bother to shred are credit card or loan offers that have a “personal response code.” God, I wish they’d stop doing that.

I can attest to the truth of what Lymis and smartalec are saying. My name is almost impossible to spell, and it’s fun to trace it from one mailing list to another by the various misspellings.

Dana, my husband says “Buenas noches” and nothing else. A Spanish surname for a Filipino person means that some callers are expecting us to speak Spanish, though. This happened a few days ago—they asked for him, he answered “buenas noches,” the began a whole long spiel in Spanish, and then (speaking no Spanish) my husband asked in English to be taken off their call list.

We just recycle. For a while we were getting junk mail for my mother (who died 13 years ago, and I changed her address to ours back when we lived in another state.) Some of it was from groups connected to the church she had belonged to, and most of those stopped after I wrote a politely blistering letter to the local bishop…

Why, oh why do these things keep coming even after you’ve asked them to stop?

Working hypothesis: it costs more to remove you from the list than it does to keep you there and keep sending you crap.

It’s probably pretty cheap to send one person junk mail, if you’re sending a million people junk mail anyway through a company which does nothing but provide that service; on the other hand, to *not* send one person junk mail may involve up to ten or fifteen minutes of an actual worker’s actual time, to get your name removed or marked for deletion in whatever databases, lists, and content repositories make up their mass-mailing arrangements. Sure, a properly designed client application for the phone workers would allow them to do this in one click—but proper design and implementation cost real money, too, and the phrase “loss leader” was invented for telephone customer-service departments. So if it’s cheaper to “lose” those requests, and there’s no real drawback to doing so (you may have ceased doing business with a company because of their junk mail, but you’re very much in the minority if so, and I bet it didn’t even make the junk mail stop anyway) why not do so right up until you’re sued into grudging compliance with the client’s request?

Me, I just dump the stuff in the recycling bin, take its recurring arrival as yet another example of how we’ve fucked our society up so badly that there’s no real sense to be found in anything—after all, if I were going to give Comcast or Working Assets any money at all, I’d have started doing so long before now—and get on with my life.

I am collecting them until I have enough to send them to an incinerator of some kind.  Know of any services that will let you watch?

Yep! It’s called “Backyard Bonfire International”. Granted, they do require a certain minimal level of capability on the part of the client—if you’ve ever toasted a marshmallow and not set your eyebrows on fire in the process, you’re probably okay—but I’ve always found their services to be second to none in terms of quality, reliability, and the fine powdery nature of the resulting paper ash.

(Of course, if you live in a city, you’re probably SOL.)

Colorado Dave, banisteriopsis, isn’t that machine generally called a “goat”?

I like to send them envelopes filled with cornstarch and a short note explaining that it’s Holy Jesus Powder blessed by Sarah Palin’s witchdoctor and they should sprinkle it over themselves to improve their sales figures :D

Yeah, real funny, because somebody who makes a living by opening envelopes for $7 an hour needs nothing more to liven up their day than an anthrax scare.

When I was in Amsterdam not too long ago, I walked by numerous houses that had standardized signs posted next to their mail slots.  The signs said, in effect, that the residents have “opted out” of junk mail.  The mail delivery personnel are not legally allowed to put (identifiable) junk mail into those slots.  Other houses I saw had separate slots for junk mail.

I laugh at the thought that we could pass a law allowing people to opt out of junk mail in this country.

The mail delivery personnel are not legally allowed to put (identifiable) junk mail into those slots.

That sounds great, except, how do you determine what is and isn’t junk mail? Anything paid at the bulk (junk) rate, I guess.

The “up to 6 weeks to take effect” thing is because bulk mail goes out so early. Mail houses might be sending out materials in mid-August that were to reach the customer the week of Halloween.

I love junk mail that solicits for money and includes a prepaid reply envelope.

Speaking as somebody who used to open those envelopes for a living, I was never bothered by the people who loaded them up with junk mail and sent them back—it’s a free country, and we *were* soliciting you. But I hated the ones who sent graphic naked photos, and I would have been unpleasantly surprised by the cornstarch, to say the least.

When you are shredding that catalog stuff, be sure you check the order pages inside as your name and address are frequently pre-printed on them.

Why, oh why do these things keep coming even after you’ve asked them to stop?

Simply because they can. The marginal cost is practically nothing, so they gain nothing if they stop sending you crap. If they keep sending you crap, it’s always possible that either you or some later resident at the address will bite eventually.

I really, really fucking resent the fact that people are paid to literally stuff trash through my letterbox. I have better things to do with my time that clean up that shit.

The mail delivery personnel are not legally allowed to put (identifiable) junk mail into those slots.

That sounds great, except, how do you determine what is and isn’t junk mail? Anything paid at the bulk (junk) rate, I guess.

Anything that is not addressed to you is junk mail in this system. So catalogues and credit card offers could still arrive (although those things seem to be much more of a problem in the USA than in the Netherlands - I have NEVER received an unsollicited credit card offer), but no folders, flyers, papers that you haven’t subscribed to etc.

For the stuff that is addressed to you, you can have yourself be included in a “Do not send junk mail” registry. That actually works, too.

I bought one item online from the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.  This year I have gotten four copies of their gift shop catalog, all with different covers but the same interior.  These are glossy and printed on heavy paper; they must cost a fortune to print.  I don’t even live on the same coast!

EVERY SINGLE DAY I separate it into my mail, his mail, and recycling. Then I open my envelopes and sort into pay/do and recycle. I sort my catalogs (which I love getting) into recycle immediately and look at then use and recycle. I do this while standing near the recycling bin.

MKK

RE: Phone solicitation

These guys never fail to call while I’m fixing dinner and I sometimes I rather enjoy the distraction while I’m chopping onions or what ever. For the most part, these folks really can’t hang up on you unless you get rude with them. I figure I’m doing someone else a favor by keeping this person from call the next person on the list. Lots of tactics are fun for example, take a second to make note of their scripted points and then just drag them back and forth through their script. That tactic gets them pretty upset sometimes, one guy wound up practically begging me to just say “no thank you” so that he could take his break for which he was 10 minutes over due. My wife loves when I role play crazy/silly personae, cracking her up till shes in tears sometimes.