<p>I’ve been getting frustrated with the amount of junkmail that always shows up each day (seriously X credit card company I didn’t take you up on your last 137 consecutive weekly offers for your card so why do you think I’ll change my mind this week ). Anyway a friend of mine recently advised me of a tactic which I now subscribe to. </p>
<p>Essentially take out the business reply ‘postage to be paid by addressee’ envelopes and collect them in a basket. Then, next time you have to walk to the mailbox to mail something pick up the collection of empty envelopes and pop them in the mail too. Better yet, put something heavy in the envelope (e.g. shreaded bits of junkmail or some heavy object) to boost the postage charged to the senders account. </p>
<p>According to the post office it’s perfectly legit and so long as you don’t put any identifying info back in the envelope they’ll never know who it came from… but they still have to foot the bill. If X bank sends me 40 ‘you’ve been preapproved’ bits of junk each year and I send their envelopes back with heavy junk in them (so the postage is about $0.75-$1) that adds up to a not insignificant sum of money, or should I say “penalty charge”, for annoying me ;-). </p>
<p>It doesn’t take any time (since I need to open up the envelopes anyway to run the contents through my puny paper shredder) and it’s kind of fun for those days when you just need to vent on something;-). </p>
<p>My new philosophy… you send me junk I send you junk back… and you have to pay for it both ways! ;-)</p>
<p>Opting out formally will lessen all junk mail from banks, insurance, credit card companies and any and all business that buy your info. It will prohibit the credit reporting agencies and their subsidiaries from selling your info. Will also take you out of their products they sell to creditors such as “credit triggers” which cause other creditor to soft pull your credit or issue you junk mail every time a credit “trigger” occurs on your report(s) ie., credit limits increase, new employer, address change, new accounts, looking for a mortgage or refi.</p>
<p>You can also freeze your credit reports so they cannot be pulled at all without you releasing with PIN specific reports for specific time periods.</p>
<p>On a related topic, beware of mandatory mailings from credit card companies that masquerade as junk mail. Every time they rewrite the terms of their cardholder agreement (raise penalties, interest rates, cancel benefits etc), they have to notify you. I’ve noticed these notifications sometimes arrive in envelopes filled with “special offers” of some kind that are unrelated to the real reason for sending the notice. They’re betting you will simply discard the letter as junk mail.</p>
<p>The problem with sending the empty envelope back is that it doesn’t work. These companies simply count the number of envelopes returned to see if their campaign is successful; an empty one counts just as much as a full one. So you’re really shooting yourself in the foot.</p>
<p>I would suggest sending back the reply envelopes with a note: “please remove my name from your mailing list”… and include your name and address.</p>
<p>Perhaps, but given that I don’t subscribe to any of their products, and have no intention of doing so, that is of little concern to me. </p>
<p>I agree that it’s not exactly going to drive the company into bankruptcy but it’s a fun way of dealing with one of life’s little annoyances.</p>
<p>Even if you sign up for the ‘don’t send me stuff’ lists you still can gets lots of junkmail… they just add ‘or current resident’ to the address and then the post office is still obligated to deliver it.</p>
<p>^^ I would advise against that. That just tells them the name and address are correct and valid, and that this person opens and responds to junkmail. Even if they remove your name from the mailing list, they can turn around and sell your details to another mailing list.</p>
<p>dmd, I don’t think they read notes on the forms.</p>
<p>What kills me is the poor weeding of mailing lists. My kids were 6 when they first rented skis. Two months later they started getting junk mail trying to get them to subscribe to Golf Digest. A month after my son was born, I got a letter to get me to join AARP (I was 26). </p>
<p>The funniest is the political mail we get. Because we are registered members of a Catholic parish, but we are also registered as Democratic voters, we get mail from both pro- and anti- abortion lobby groups. One day I got junk mail requesting money from NARAL (Nat’l Abortion Rights group) and the Nat’l Right To Life group ON THE SAME DAY. I put them both in the trash, BTW.</p>
<p>Agreed with vicariousparent… don’t do that and don’t put any identifying info in the return envelope.</p>
<p>The same goes with Spam e-mail. If you reply saying ‘take me off your list’ the only thing that does is confirm to the Spammer that it’s a real address that a real person is reading. The volume of Spam will then massively go up, not down.</p>
<p>One of my favorite memories is of about 10 years ago, before the “do not call” registry existed. I was working at home and got a call from a credit card company wanting me to take their card. I pretended to be interested and also pretended to be extremely stupid, so I asked question after question. Kept them on the phone for about 20 minutes, until they had had enough of me and they hung up. Yeah, it was 20 minutes of my time, but the memory is priceless!!</p>
<p>What you might also do is convert the discussion and try to help the telemarketer consider other lines of work. It takes some self discipline to sit on the telephone and try to convince total strangers to buy things, etc. I cannot imagine it’s pleasant work at all, and I can also guess that the people who are doing the calling hate every minute of it but are doing it because they have to eat, pay rent, etc. </p>
<p>I have encouraged such callers to clean up their resumes, given them tips on companies who are hiring, referred them to online job boards, and once in my career I even encouraged such a person to interview with me because I was hiring at the time (I cannot remember if I ended up hiring them or not - probably not…)… </p>
<p>You can start such a conv. just by cutting in and saying "hold on, why are you doing this for a living? followed by “how much educatiin do you have…” and so on…they’ll either engage, or they will hang up because their supervisor is monitoring.</p>
<p>^^ that probably actually helps them. They get a couple of minutes break from having to repeat their pitch, plus, they are almost certainly evaluated by dials and minutes, if so, you’re helping them get their minutes up - the connection clock runs regardless of if anyone is talking. The only way it hurts is if they are getting some sort of commission for whatever it is they’re pitching…</p>
<p>I put junk mail in a completely different category for the other kinds of junk being discussed here. </p>
<p>Junk E-mails cost literally only pennies per thousand for a company to send (even if the mailing list is legitimate there are administration costs, etc.).</p>
<p>Junk phone calls cost a few cents each, usually because they use recordings and so on to verify the presence of a person at the other end.</p>
<p>Junk mail costs postage–at 15 to 20 cents per envelope–and much more than that for catalogs, which can cost several dollars (or more) to print and send. A return envelope runs about 40 cents, even empty. That is why asking to be removed from junk mail lists actually works. They don’t want to send out catalogs to people who aren’t interested. I have found a quick call to the company’s 800 number also works very well. </p>
<p>I differentiate here between purchased mail lists and mail from those with whom you do business (mail orders, financial institutions, colleges). The best way to reduce your purchased list mail is to use services like those described above–and to be careful about getting on those lists in the first place.</p>
<p>Telemarketers? I immediately say, “I’m not interested” or “We can’t donate to anything right now” and then hang up before they can say anything. I try to say it politely, but I figure they may as well move on to their next target as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>But my SIL used to say to telemarketers, “Really? You want to sell me something? Oh that’s awesome! I’m so sick of all those collection agencies calling me! Seriously, my husband is gonna get a job someday and maybe we’ll pay our bills then! But what did you want me to buy?” Usually they’d hang up. ;-)</p>
). Anyway a friend of mine recently advised me of a tactic which I now subscribe to. </p>