Like a lot of perople on this board, I get a lot of credit card solicitations. I usually shred them. Would it be illegal to shove all the inserts back into the business reply envelope and send them back to the sender?
<JOKE>
Well, you could paste that baby on a brick and drop it in mail.
</JOKE>
I do this all the time - I leave out the stuff with personal info and send the rest back.
…gives me a small amount of satisfaction somehow…
There is a thread in MPSIMS about this very subject, which refers to Cecil’s take on the matter.
I got another solicitation from Capital One. I cut out any reference to me including the “customer locator code” on the envelope and I’m going to send it back. Of course, this won’t help stopping them from sending me more (I usually get 3-4 EVERY WEEK from these people), but maybe if everybody did this, they’d stop.
I usually just write “REFUSED, RETURN TO SENDER, MOVED NO FOWARDING ADDRESS”. Oddly sometimes it just get’s delivered right back to me, so I started scratching out my address and the barcode. What I HOPE happens is that it get’s back the whereever it came from and they take my name off the list. What really happens I assume is that the PO just throws it away. For some (ie Discover that I used to get several of each week), I just called and asked them to stop sending them and they stopped. I just explained that I wasn’t interested in a Discover card right now, and if I do decide to get one I’ll get it off the internet. And I haven’t received one in months.
Tried that. It worked for about a month.
I may write to that address in Cecil’s column.
You’d think Capital One would have gotten the message by now. They’ve killed at least a whole tree trying to get me to to take one of their cards.
Of course, if they were to actually check my credit rating, they would stop immediately.
Well, what would happen if you really did something like that? I dunno, put scrap metal in the envelopes, and mail a whole bunch of them off. Do these business envelopes have weight limits? I’d guess the mail office would just not deliver them, but what would they do with them?
- The local postal worker will throw it away as soon as it’s found in the mailbox.
- The Post Office will charge you with “abuse of the mails” (unlikely, but possible if you do this regularly and they catch you).
All this is explained it the ancient* Cecil column on the matter (cited above), which you apparently didn’t bother to read.
*Ancient enough the the postal rate is referred to as 20¢ – it’s well beyond that now.
But the column is refering to labels of some sort, yes? As in, using the business reply envelop as a kind of label. I’m totally enclosing whatever I’m mailing the in the envelope, so that rule wouldn’t apply.
Right?
There’s not much point to that, plus you don’t want to be spreading your personal information (of which there is often some in credit card solicitations) around.
I don’t see anything illegal about it though. Personally, every time I get one I put a funny newspaper comic, nifty optical illusion, or plastic cereal-box toy in it.
Don’t know what happens to them afterwards, but I like to think it makes it to the desk of someone who opens thousands of these a day for minimum wage. I always imagine they’d need it.
I do it all the time. I’ve shreded everything but the return envelope and sent that, I always every last scrap of paper they sent me, including the outer envelope.
Yep, I’ve always done that… I send everything back that has a postage paid envelope. I mix them up if there is more than one and send everything they sent back to them or the other. They have to pay first class postage on mail back to them.
I wish there was a way to make spammers pay for every spam message.
Wrong.
If your goal is to get off the list, why remove all identifying information?
If you want to get no junk mail, do as Uncle Cecil says and contact the DMA.
If you just don’t want junk mail from the sender, contact the sender.
Here’s the secret folks… legit businesses want to purge dead leads from their lists. It costs them money to send this stuff, and if you’re never going to open it or buy anything, they’d just as soon lose your name.
Spammers, spimmers, and e-scammers don’t particularly care, since they’re not paying postal rates. But even postal scammers want hot names, not dead leads.
And yes, whoever opens your mail is getting a wage, not a salary, and is not a key decision maker. But with a few keystrokes she can probably get you off the list. So if you want to send something funny, ok, but take the time to write something along the lines of “Please remove me from your mailing list and don’t send anything to me again” on it.
For my money, that counts as legitimate business correspondence, and therefore falls within the law for return mail.
You could always try sending the stuff back with bricks attached.
Now there’s an original thought. :rolleyes:
Sorry. That should have been “Here’s the secret, folks…”.
As far as I know, there are no secret folks.
Then again, how would I know?
You could always send back a brick.
What?
In a previous job we sent out a couple of mail shots. (To business addresses). The worse we got back was an old telephone directory. Still costs us excess postage. We viewed it as just one of the risks of the project, you can’t make people only send back exactly what you want them to.
I just got laid off from a job opening returned mail . There were hundreds of totes of the stuff. We, there were about 25 of us, opened the letters, later it was opened by machine, and took out the letter that had a barcode at the bottom and threw the rest away.
FWIW I alone counted over 30 to the same guy.
This was just part time work through one of the temp agencies.
Sometimes there were notes inside.Pretty funny.
They were mixed from credit card companies.
One I remember was from the democratic party discover card IIRC. It had a note scribbled on it stating that there were no baby killing democrats living at that address.