Gidday,

You know I do love some of the catalogs that come to our home, REI, Edmund Scientific’s, Lego, Sierra Trading Post, Lands End Kids and others. We do not get many besides these and if I want others I just get online and order directly from their website. No need for wasting resources. We have been selectively opting out of postal junk mail in our house since 1999 and now only receive 1-2 catalogs a week. That’s not a misprint, infact it might be a bit of an exaggeration! When I get them I am pleased to see them and spend a good few hours going through them to see what is new. I actually really enjoy my current catalog choice!

The other pieces of my mail consist of a few direct mail offers. If I go through what I have received this past week, I have a an offer for Vonage, an old Navy Holiday Gift, a local clothing store Elena Ciccone advertisement, United Mileage plus credit card offer, Wells Fargo newsletter and the Colorado Talking Library annual fund raiser. All of these we either have relationships with or use in our daily lives, except Vonage which I need to deal with….hmmm a piece of junk mail!

So what is unwanted Junk Mail? Every consumer has different ideas of junk mail in varying degrees. Some of our members do not want any direct mail, some want to define their preferences by being selective, some only want to get rid of credit card offers or sweepstakes.

If a consumer wants to stop their unwanted postal junk mail it includes catalogs but this is a small part of the big picture. There are many other types (or categories) of direct mail including, magazines, airlines, fund raisers, publishers, computer resellers, cable companies, non-profits, colleges, banks, credit bureaus, churches, insurance companies, newspapers, newsletters, financial institutions, clubs, department stores and many more.

We all have bank accounts, credit cards and cell phones, we all have email accounts, we subscribe to magazines and newspapers, we move house, we buy property, members of book clubs, we shop online, we went to college. Think of all the places and times you give out your personal information, it is endless.

We freely give out our information to catalogers and they in turn very nicely sell, rent or share that data without our knowledge. Hence the viral spread of your personal data becomes common knowledge and property of many different direct marketers.

We also give out our names and addresses to other major institutions that we trust because we have very necessary relationships with them. Most all of these companies have privacy policies, some state that they will not share or sell but in most cases the onus is on you , the consumer, to opt-out, not opt-in. You are opted in until you opt out. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

At stopthejunkmail.com we have been helping our members opt out of direct mail since 2001 and we have a list of over 9,000 direct mail companies by title and growing.

Here are comments from CurrentBUzz , The Full Mommy and Hatchlings about unwanted junk mail which prompted me to write this.

Cheerio,
Margot