What's the best way to stop junk postal mail?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m getting tired of having to walk down the street to get my postal mail, only to find it’s mostly, if not all, junk mail. I can’t remember ever getting a piece of junk mail I actually wanted, which means I have to haul it back home and throw it in my already full garbage. I complained to my postal carrier about it, suggesting there should be a way to opt out of receiving unsolicited mail, but she said that without junk mail, the USPS would be out of business, and that they are dependent on it to stay afloat.

I mentioned my frustration to my daughter, and she suggested I try DMAchoice, which charges a nominal fee to have your name removed from legitimate companies’ marketing mailing lists. While that might theoretically help, most of my junk mail isn’t addressed to me, but “to the owner of the house at (insert my address)”, so DMAchoice won’t help me with that junk mail. She also suggested I get a sticker for my mailbox that says “No Junk Mail” or “No Unsolicited Mail,” and that may stop the USPS from leaving me junk mail, but I doubt that works, or everybody would be doing it.

Has anyone tried DMAchoice or putting a sticker on their mailbox, and did either one help in a significant way? And by “significant,” I mean cutting it by 75% or more.

2

I use Catalog Choice which is free and has been fairly good.

For Red Plum mailers I go right to the source and opt out Delivery Options | Save.com | Place a Request | Save.com

The best thing I’ve done is to sign up with USPS Informed Delivery to get an email every day that shows photos of the mail I’m going to get that day, and also a list of packages. If there’s not something I’m looking forward to getting I just don’t get the mail that day.

3

Thanks, I’ll try that, along with Catalog Choice.

4

Not an answer to your question, but a possible workaround. Set up a USPS account so you can get Informed Delivery emails. Each morning (that you have mail coming), you’ll get an email showing you a scanned image of each of your pieces of mail. If it’s all junk mail, or at least nothing worth getting today, just leave it in the mailbox. Personally, that’s what I do. Once a week or so, I will go and get all the junk mail out and toss it, but other than that, it’s nice not having to go walk all the way out there, especially in bad weather, just to get a bunch of junk I don’t want.

5

I recommend putting the junk mail in the recycling bin rather than the landfill bin.

6

Back when junk mail was much worse than it is today, I heard about someone who got a PO box and told all of his friends to use that address only and made sure that all of his “real” mail went to the PO box. Then he took his regular address and subscribed to every bit of junk mail that he could find. He received so much junk mail that he was able to heat his house with it all winter.

Junk mail is probably not the most environmentally friendly fuel, but hey, it was free.

The OP doesn’t necessarily need to use junk mail as fuel, but setting up a PO box to separate the real mail from the junk mail might work.

7

Where I live, there is no recycling bin. Recyclables are sorted and removed from the trash collected by the disposal company. I could save it up and take it to a recycling center 30 miles away myself, but I would have to pay them to take it, which really doesn’t make sense.

8

P.O. boxes aren’t free. I would have to contact the companies I communicate with by mail and give them my P.O. box address, and I would still have to sort through the junk mail in my mailbox.

9

Advertising guy here, with enough experience in direct mail marketing to be dangerous.

First, I empathize with the OP’s frustration. Most days, the entire contents of my mailbox go directly from the mailbox to the recycling bin. Unfortunately, I doubt that you can achieve your goal of “cutting it by 75% or more.”

I am extremely skeptical that this would work, though I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Such a sticker is, in essence, requesting your letter carrier to make a qualitative judgement on each piece of mail that’s destined for your mailbox, and decide, “is this junk mail or not?” You may think that it’d be an obvious decision, but a lot of advertising mail is made to look a lot like legitimate mail. Even if your letter carrier would/could do this, you’d also be empowering them to potentially throw away a desired piece of mail, because it looked like junk mail to them.

Regardless, such assessments aren’t their job. Their job is to accurately and safely deliver every piece of mail that’s addressed to you, to your mailbox.

Even worse, such a service would do absolutely nothing to stop the “carrier route pre-sort” junk mail. Those often (but not always) are postcard-format, and don’t even have your address on them: it may simply say something like “Postal Customer” in the “address” section:

The way those work is that the direct mailers know how many residential addresses are in each “carrier route” for each ZIP code (information which is provided to them by USPS), and they send bulk mailings of the pieces to each post office, with each bulk package labeled for a particular carrier route.

Let’s say that you are on “Route 03” for your ZIP code, and that there are 500 residential addresses on that route. When the letter carrier for Route 03 comes to work, their first job is to sort out the day’s mail for each address on their route, prior to actually beginning delivery. They’ll open up the pre-sort packages, each of which will have 500 pieces, and sort one piece into each address’s stack of mail for the day.

10

I’ve always received junk mail in my PO boxes, though not the fliers for local grocery chains and window replacement.

11

DMAChoice.org will stop a huge fraction of junk mail. It takes 3-4 months to really see the effect, but it’s huge. I’ve been using it for decades and it really works.

The other useful thing is to visit OptOutPrescreen.com and sign up for their service. 100% legit and 100% effective.

The last thing is to never, and I mean never, ever donate a penny to anyone who wants your email or mailing address. A completely anonymous donation is great. But anyone who knows who you are will hound you forever after. Don’t do that.

12

You’re closer to this than I. So I defer to your expertise.

But I get very little “Car-Rte presort” crap since doing the DMAchoice opt out. Perhaps at least some of them have gotten smarter?

13

I doubt it, honestly. DMAChoice stops participating direct mail marketers from sending things to your specific address, because it places your address on their “do not mail” list; it has no control over what happens at the post office – and that’s where the pre-sort items (which aren’t even labeled with your address) get put into your mail.

14

Hmm. That certainly sounds logical. And you’re the pro in this conversation, not me. Time for me to defer as gracefully as my aging coordination permits.

15

Also, just one other point, related to DMAchoice.

The OP commented, about it:

I just want to clarify something here. DMAchoice is operated by the Association of National Advertisers, and its members are largely major companies which are involved in advertising: big companies, big media channels, and big advertising agencies. Those are the types of companies which are going to be participating in the DMAchoice program, and the types of companies which will not be sending you stuff if you sign up for that program.

But, that still leaves smaller, local companies, which are, in fact, “legitimate companies,” but just aren’t big enough that they have joined the ANA, or signed up to participate in DMAchoice. Local restaurants, home improvement companies, retailers, dental clinics, etc., are all perfectly legitimate companies, even if being on DMAchoice’s “do not mail list” doesn’t keep them from mailing stuff to you. DMAchoice is (probably) going to keep you from getting unsolicited marketing mail from, say, Chase or AT&T; it’s not going to keep you from getting mail from your local real estate broker.

16

Huh. DMAChoice works great for me, always has, and charges exactly zero for their services.

I don’t know where the OP got the idea that DMAChoice costs money, but color me very baffled about that.

17

That may have changed since you signed up; their website now indicates that they charge $6 for a 10-year “membership” ($7 if you choose to sign up via mail, rather than online).

Just to note, I’m not disputing that signing up for DMAchoice works – I’m just noting that, for various reasons, it may not completely (or nearly completely) shut down junk mail.

18

Agree it’s less than 100%. But it’s a big chunk of the total.

Color me surprised that it costs. But I welcome the correction to my posted obsolete ideas. Enshittification continues apace. Arrghh!

Unrelated to the above…

I’ll note that DMAChoice is better at prevention than cure. If you’re facing a move, sign up at the new address before signing the lease, closing on the sale, or filing a change of address with USPS.

19

This absolutely will NOT work.
Any postal carrier who did this would be fired, or at least reprimanded. Postal carriers are required to deliver every piece of mail to the address – that IS their job. Failing to do their job will get them in trouble.

20

We have this in Switzerland and it works very well. I get almost no junk mail.

I did make one big mistake with charities though. One Christmas season about 20 years ago I decided to give money to every donation request I received. They were all legitimate good causes, but now my name and address are on their lists forever. They even managed to follow me when I moved