In Canada, a “No Junk Mail” sticker on your mailbox is the official way of notifying Canada Post not to deliver unaddressed admail to you.
I go weeks without receiving any physical mail these days.
What happens if you just keep marking junk mail Return to Sender and dumping in the nearest mailbox unopened? Doesn’t USPS judy destroy bulk mail instead of actually returning it?
What happens is you make extra work for some poor already overworked USPS employee. And nothing else. It’s sort of a combo of you vandalizing the USPS and shooting the messenger.
Oh, it has one side effect. You increase the odds some legit mail somebody else pout into that mailbox gets lost amongst your junk and is discarded.
Yet another way in which you fine folks prove that we down here do not live in a civilized country. If only.
Thanks, everyone, for your replies. I have found that, at least in the US, if you are willing to take the time to contact a legit charity, they will usually remove you from their mailing list. It doesn’t always work, and it’s time-consuming, but at least you can try that if that is where your junk mail is coming from. Unfortunately, that’s not the problem I have.
Seeing how the amount of junk mail I receive keeps growing, my guess is that companies sell names and addresses they have captured to companies that are looking for new customers wherever they can find them, thus proliferating junk mail. I don’t see any way to stop that from happening.
Exactly. Just throw it away. The junk mailers actually pay for that which subsidizes the USPS. Like several people already said, sign up for informed delivery.
I don’t think they need to do that for anything other than first class mail, and just junk mail isn’t.
I confess, i like getting junk mail, because it means the letter carrier needs to come to my mailbox every day. Which means i can reliably mail a letter by putting it in my mailbox.
Also, i have the type of suburban delivery the post office is phasing out, where my mail box is at my door, not on the street (or worse, in a cluster at the other end of the development.) So it’s not very hard to reach out the front door and empty it.
But I’ll also recommend the service where they send you a photo of everything they are going to deliver that day. My husband has it, and it’s very reliable and he always knows if there’s something important in the mail.
As others have said, a “No Junk” won’t work because the junk mailers have paid for the service and USPS is legally obligated to deliver it.
It does work in New Zealand, or at least it mostly did when I lived there until about 25 years ago. The big difference is that anyone is allowed to put something in a mailbox. NZ Post does not have a monopoly like USPS. Junk mail is usually delivered by other companies because it’s cheaper and they generally respect those stickers because it doesn’t look good for their clients to ignore them. I can remember when a local political candidate stuck his leaflet in everyone’s mailbox, whether they had a sticker or not. It was not well received. It made the local news with a discussion about whether this qualified as junk or not. It might have cost him the election.
It also means that you can leave something in a friend’s mailbox if they’re not home. It was quite a surprise to me when I moved to the US that you’re not allowed to do that here.
That is how that industry works. But the DMAChoice thing works pretty well to put the brakes on that. Not to a standstill, but to a crawl.