Gidday,

I have just been catching up on a segment called “Lighten the Load - Return to Sender” I saw with Bill Moyers on PBS talking about his personal issues concerning opting out of postal junk mail. How easy it is to get on lists and what can you do to reduce the onslaught coming to your mail box.

I find Daniel Katz statistics about the number of catalogs each person receives interesting but here’s some statistics from our own stopthejunkmail.com junk mail report Our members say that they get on average 14 catalogs or more a week or 780 catalogs per year! If you weigh 14 catalogs that’s about 5lbs of paper each week (and that doesn’t include direct mail solicitations). If you add that up that’s about 230lbs each year of junk mail per household.

Don’t forget you also receive junk mail from direct mail companies such as banks, credit card companies, airlines, insurance companies, magazines, newspapers, non-profits and many other companies you are affiliated with in some way. In fact if you order a magazine you are immediately adding your name to a publishers mailing list ,and someone like Conde Nast has over 30 publications. Have you thought about who else may share or sell your private information over and over again? Catalogs are but just a small piece of this puzzle.

At stopthejunkmail.com we handle all of these titles individually. So if you want to still get Vogue magazine but not Golf Digest you can select these by title from our enhanced list of direct mail publications. Similarly LL Bean has some 15 catalog titles depending upon the season and Lands End about 8 titles, our members can select to receive LL Bean Home, but not LL Bean Kids for instance.

The best advice is if you do have to order from a catalog or online you should always request the company not to sell, rent or share you private information. You should also contact your banks, credit card companies, anyone you have an account with and request that you are opted out of advertising and that they do not rent or sell your private data.

Our members are happy to use stopthejunkmail.com to better define their direct mail shopping preferences and even in our household we only get the catalogs we love to shop from and bills of course, can’t do anything about them!

At stopthejunkmail.com we have been helping consumers protect their privacy now for 6 years, since 2001. It has been our own personal passion to pass our knowledge on to consumers whether they are members or not.

Interesting items: I just read another item from

Cheerio,
Margot