I get 3 pieces of junk mail for every legitimate item from Wells Fargo.
Quite annoying. I do open every piece of mail from them, and curse them out loud for every piece of crap.
This is the part I don’t get. Yes, if you open the letter and it turns out to be junk, you spent ten seconds of your time because of a junk-mailer. IMHO, the precaution of opening everything and very briefly perusing it (NOT reading it in detail) outweighs the momentary feeling that I was “tricked”. If you still resent the junk mail, open it to be sure, then burn it, or make voodoo dolls of it, or however you express that resentment. 
I know my bills too, especially since most come on-line. 
But I’m not expecting all the legitimate mail that I get. Governments generally don’t e-mail formal notices (pay your property taxes, air-test your car, renew your driving license, license plate sticker, city sticker, etc.) to members of the public, they still use snail mail. And a lot of government mail seems to not come from where you’d expect it – city mail with an out-of-city address, county mail from outside the county, even state mail from outside the state – because they “farmed out” a bulk-but-legitimate mailing.
We are now using our first Caucasian/non-illegal alien gardener who sends out his bill with my name completely mangled. He uses a computer program to do the mailings and we get tons of other gardening service junk mail promitions all the time. His bill has gotten pitched more than once because of those two facts. I have tried to correct him numerous times as to the correct spelling of my first and last name, which are quite simple, yet he still sends the generic misspelled bills.
We also have the problem of an idiot mailman who sometimes sticks the real mail inside the oversized flyer from the supermarket. This once resulted in me nearly throwing out concert tickets, which also come in a suspicious junkmail style envelope to prevent their theft. Now I look through everything more carefully.
I don’t worry about it. All of my bills are due at the same time each month, so I don’t wait for a bill prior to paying it. Even better, most of my utilities are monthly averaged, so I only take a look once a year or so.
All of my bills are paid automatically (and statements sent electronically), so I don’t worry about throwing away a bill. I throw about 80% of our mail away unopened. We generally get at least three CC offers a day, and various other “refinance your mortgage” shit. It would take longer than 10 seconds a day to open all that crap, and it would put me in a bad mood.
A friend of mine found out credit card applications (and other scary stuff) were going to the tenants in some of his properties, with his name on it.
He had a tough time fixing that mess. As far as I know, he did not have any identity theft as a result, but Gawd, what a horrible chance of disaster, and to have junk mailers obliviously mailing that stuff. . . .
I never missed a mortgage payment until the mortgage holder sold it to a different bank when I had one payment left. I tried to pay it off before the switch but I still had about a 30.00 balance for some reason and I didn’t recognize the bill when I got it. The new bank was a big one that had been flooding me with junk mail and I thought that was what it was.
I’m completely paperless. No bills come in the mail. I keep track on my wall calendar which bills should becoming up on auto-pay to make sure what’s coming out of my account, and all the bill payment notifications and e-statements go in their own email folders for easy reference if needed. I write maybe two checks a year. I have the same checks from three addresses ago from when I opened this checking account in 2000.
I get a little junk mail, but not much. My mailbox is frequently empty 2-3 days in a row and I love it! I get a couple of catalogs from places I actually buy stuff from and Netflix discs. I do still open any junk mail I do get, though, because I’ve noticed that a lot of stuff does come very generic-looking these days. I’ve been getting insurance checks in the mail, so have been watching extra carefully lately. I would feel wary about not checking all envelopes, though, and if I threw something out without opening it I would have a creepy feeling about it.
I have just enjoyed a year without electricity bills thanks to this. Someone signed up with a supplier using my address (by mistake) and everything they sent I just routinely threw in the bin. Turned out that when it was all sorted out I went back to my real supplier but a year’s worth of bills disappeared into the ether.
I’ve done that. Specifically to a dentist bill that came around the holidays in a blue decorative envelope. All cards that even vaguely resemble a ‘Holiday’ or ‘Birthday’ card go directly from the mailbox to the shredder.
I paid after they called me up and left a message about the outstanding balance.
I guess I am taking a little bit of a chance but I have only made the mistake a couple of times and how much is that worth? It takes me more than 10 seconds to read through one of those insurance sales letters masquerading as a an important notice from my mortgage company. Those still trick me sometimes, partly because the mortgage company has sold them the information they need to fool me. Maybe I should use your voodoo method 
I give money to a few groups - that means that I get at least one letter, sometime as many as 10, in a week from that group telling me about about their great new need. Those never get opened. The very name of the charity becomes a sort of filter mechanism. In the end, I’m willing to risk missing a bill once in a while to get through that huge stack of junk quickly.
Almost all the junkmail I’ve seen that looks like a bill prominently proclaims “This is not a bill.” And most of my bills will say “Bill enclosed” on them.
And even then, I usually open everything. It’s fun seeing how they are trying to trick me today. Just like I occasionally go to my SPAM email and look at the titles. It’s fun. It would only be frustrating if I thought they could actually trick me.
Before I went to paying everything electronically the mortgage company failed to mention, or at least failed to mention prominently enough for me, that they were changing the look of the statement and bill. It almost looked cartoonish from the outside and more like a solicitation than anything official. So I tossed it, oops.
After I noticed a late payment charge I explained what happened and they reversed the charge since apparently I wasn’t the only one who did that.
I haven’t thrown out any bills (that I know of!), but I have, like the OP, let magazine subscriptions lapse. Since so many magazines send out tons of renewal solicitations months and months before my current subscription would run out, I’ve become conditioned to just toss them out unopened. See, magazines—you’re screwing yourselves with your overzealousness.
In my case, I was watching for them, so I figured that’s what they were, but the envelope did look unobtrusive and potentially junk-maily. Still, I understand why they don’t mail envelopes marked VALUABLE GIFT CERTIFICATES ENCLOSED or NEW CREDIT CARD INSIDE.
I can often tell, by the return address, that it’s something like a charitable solicitation or a sales offer. If there’s no return address or other indication on the envelope whom it’s from, I’ll probably open it to see, but if it’s junk I’ll be pissed off and vow never to do business with that company or donate to that charity.
So far I haven’t thrown out anything important. I was opening everything, just in case, but I soon realized that we get a lot of junk mail. More than half of our mail is junk. So to cut down on the time spent tearing all this stuff open to check it, I now toss some of it without looking. For example, neither I nor my husband has anything to do with Chase - so anything with a Chase logo goes straight in the mail. Ditto for Geico, State Farm, etc. Anything with no clear identifying info gets opened. More often than not, it’s junk, but I’d rather not miss anything important.
Does anyone know any good ways to cut down on junk mail? Is there a do-not-mail registry or something?
I now do that deliberately.
Because the prices for renewing tend to get lower & lower as you get to the end of your subscription. In fact, after you let it lapse and get the “Dear lost subscriber: we want you back. This special rate…” is usually the best rate a subscriber can get. So I toss all the offers and just wait for that.
State Farm especially pisses me off. They are desperate to get our business and send us letter often, with no return address, and just a tiny little logo on it.
The only mail I toss without opening is stuff address to “current resident” or “our neighbor at”. Anything with my name gets opened, examined, and if it’s spam, shredded.
My husband donates blood a lot. At one point the blood center kept sending what I thought was junk mail. I threw out two letters and then finally opened one. It turns out they were sending him rewards like amazon gift certificates and Mets tickets. I called them and they fortunately agreed to resend all unused rewards.
I used to work for an internationally known charitable organization… this was DECADES ago. The national headquarters did something with our pensions or something and sent out bunches of checks to employees around the country. Many, many people (including me) saw the familiar logo on the envelope, assumed it was a request for money, and threw it unopened in the trash. A few months later came another envelope… an explanation, and a replacement check. This time, happily, I opened it, and yippee. I guess when hundreds of checks went undeposited and uncashed, someone Upstairs figured out what had happened…