Junk mail seems harmless enough. Maybe you’ll find something useful there. If not, you’ll just toss it out, right? But there are plenty of people who simply don’t want to fool with the stuff at all. Here are ways to get rid of 90% of the junk.
All over town, including the Circle C neighborhood of South Austin, you can find trash cans or recycle boxes where residents routinely toss their junk mail without ever reading it.
KXAN’s Jim Swift says, "What do you do with your junk mail?"
Postal Service Patron Betsy Heavner says, "It sits in my car for about two weeks until the pouch gets too full and then I throw it away."
Swift asks, "You don’t even read it?"
Heavner says, "No."
Swift asks, "You don’t even look at it?"
Postal Service Patron Ls Nichols says, "No."
Swift asks, "Why not?"
Nichols says, "Because I can tell by the cover and I rip it in half and throw it away."
But the issue is more complex than that.
Spurred on by angry consumers, legislators in several states have filed bills that would drastically cut back on junk mail.
Colorado consumer Linda Rubright says, "We have a do-not-call registry that’s wildly successful. Why couldn’t we have a do-not-junk-mail registry that would serve the same purpose?"
As you can imagine, direct-mail companies have an answer to that question.
Direct Marketing Association spokesperson Stephanie Hendricks says, "For local businesses and small businesses, losing that ability to introduce themselves to customers could be just dramatically negative for them."
U.S. companies mailed out more than 103 billion pieces of bulk mail last year. That comes to over 1.8 billion pounds of mail that earned the post office nearly $20 billion. So, obviously, the Postal Service, is not a big fan of junk-mail regulation either.
Postal Service spokesperson Al Desarro says, "I think this is another, in a way, a sense of an infringement on commerce and an infringement on free speech."
Still, critics have suggested a kind of "hit ‘em in the pocketbook" guerrilla campaign. The idea is to use the postage-paid return envelopes that come in bulk mail and send them back to the senders empty because they don’t have to pay for the postage until the piece is actually sent.
A spokesperson for the Austin Post Office discouraged such behavior and sent KXAN a list of addresses she said you can use to have 90 percent of your junk mail stopped within two to three months.
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This is the Postal Service Statement:
The Postal Service must deliver all properly posted mail. You can, however, reduce the amount of advertising mail you receive by contacting the following organizations to request removal of your name from mailing lists:
Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 282
Carmel, NY 10512-0282
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 282
Carmel, NY 10512-0282
Trans Union LLC
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 505
Woodlyn, PA 19094-0505
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 505
Woodlyn, PA 19094-0505
Experian Consumer Services
901 W. Bond Street
Lincoln, NE 68521-3694
901 W. Bond Street
Lincoln, NE 68521-3694
Equifax Inc.
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
Up to 90 percent of mailing lists are accessed by this process. Registrants generally note a decrease of unsolicited mail one to three months after their names are listed. Since some customers may receive mail under various names, include alternative names or spellings to ensure that the advertiser’s mail is stopped.
In summary, by law we must deliver ALL mail that has been paid for – including your private personal mail and that of businesses and organizations.
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