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I grab the pile of mail as I leave for work Friday morning. At lunch I scrutinize each piece, recording the date and the organization from which the mail was sent in a spreadsheet that is now 829 rows long. I note whether this is the first time I have received mail from each particular sender, and whether or not I have contacted them before. If addressed to my wife, I note if I have asked her to contact the sender before, and then I call her to see if she actually did (doing what I ask her to do is never a certainty with my wife). These days I only have to go through about 5 letters a week. When I started it was more like 25..

In a time when electronic spam, identity fraud, and warrantless wiretapping are in vogue as the newest and most insidious invaders of our privacy, I have chosen to fight a much older and more destructive intruder. An intruder that first reared its malignant head hundreds of years before the dawn of the internet. I have engaged in a full-on battle with unsolicited snail mail – junk mail as it is known to those of us who loathe it, direct marketing as it is known to those who view it as an effective means of sales and advertising (the bastards).

I guess you could probably trace the advent of junk mail back to the invention of the envelope – the first known example of which is a 4000 year old Babylonian clay wrapper – as I am sure that the first PennySaver ad pack followed soon thereafter. But it wasn’t until July 26, 1775 that American Junk Mail was given its inadvertent birth. The members of the Second Continental Congress really didn’t foresee the Pandora’s box they were opening on that fateful day when they established the U.S. Post Office. It wasn’t long before merchants grokked the marketing potential of this new institution, boosted by penny postage under the Lincoln administration and simplified by the invention of the typewriter. By the end of the 19th century the Sears and Roebuck Company was sending out 200 page catalogs and Home J. Buckley had founded the first company to offer direct mail creative services. The Direct Marketing Association was established in 1917, and with the institution of third class bulk mail in 1928 our doom was all but sealed.

The average American gets on the order of 21 pieces of junk mail per week, and wastes 8 months of their life sifting through it. About half of those average Americans wish they got less, and about half of the junk mail is never read. So why do businesses, non-profits, and associations spend over $30 billion annually on direct mail? Because about half of the recipients actually buy something from it (the misguided fools). Maybe they wouldn’t if they knew that junk mail generates 6 million tons of waste each year and fills 3% of American landfills. Maybe they’d think twice if they knew that it takes 100 million trees and 30 billion gallons of water to create all of that wasted paper. Unfortunately, I lack the gumption to tackle the flow of junk mail at its source by assailing Corporate America and the entire direct marketing paradigm or by trying to educate consumers about the deleterious effects of their purchasing behavior (go ahead, call me lazy – my Mom does), so I decided instead to take the easy way out and remove my name and address from the entire nefarious system.

I have spent the past 5 years of my life trying to make this happen – waging a continuous war against a nondescript, evolving, decentralized enemy. Sound like any other “wars” in the news these days? To take the obvious analogy one step further, one could argue that the “enemy” isn’t really a material foe at all, but rather a doctrine against which “war” can’t be waged with semantic correctness. But men of action cannot allow themselves to be hog-tied by semantics.

The cost of success in the war on junk mail follows a curve of diminishing returns. One can achieve a significant reduction with only moderate effort, but to cut it down to only a few unsolicited mailings a week takes considerable time and attention, and to eliminate it completely requires a willingness to live in a cave, grow a long beard, and eschew all human contact. (And make sure you don’t leave a forwarding address – the Post Office sells its lists of movers to a large number of direct marketing companies). Assuming you aren’t ready for a long beard, here are a few steps you can take to significantly reduce the volume of junk mail you receive (for a more extensive list consult one of the web pages referenced at the end of this article):

1. Register for the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service at http://www.dmaconsumers.org/offmailinglist.html. I think this now costs $1, but that is a pittance to pay in order to avoid ending up on the mailing lists of the thousands of businesses that subscribe to the DMA’s services.
2. Opt out of all of those credit and insurance offers you receive by filling out the form at https://www.optoutprescreen.com/.
3. Call the major "RESIDENT" and "OCCUPANT" advertisers and request to be removed from their mailing lists. These are ADVO, Inc. (888-241-6760) and PennySaver (800-422-4116).
4. Don't give your name and address to any business without explicitly requesting that they do not send you any unsolicited mail.
5. If all else fails and an organization refuses to stop sending you mail, you can invoke Title 39 of the U.S. Code, Section 3008. This states that “Whoever for himself, or by his agents or assigns, mails or causes to be mailed any pandering advertisement which offers for sale matter which the addressee in his sole discretion believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative shall be subject to an order of the Postal Service to refrain from further mailings of such materials to designated addresses thereof.” So basically you can claim that the annoying mortgage offer you keep receiving is erotically arousing and please could the Postal Service stop delivering it to your house? Just ask for USPS form 1500 at your local Post Office.

Given a few months to take effect, these five steps will significantly cut the amount of junk mail you receive, save a few trees, and free up your time for more valuable pursuits (like trying to cut down on the amount of spam in your inbox). You’ll still receive a few unsolicited mailings a week, though, and to make sure these don’t grow back into 15 or 20 you’ll need to perform some weekly or bi-weekly maintenance. I basically track all the junk mail I receive in a spreadsheet, noting from whom it came and how many times they’ve sent me unsolicited mail. If you’re not an anal retentive geek like me you can forego the spreadsheet and just take note when you get several catalogs or mailings from a particular sender. After the second or third time I usually send them an email, give them a call, or send them a letter and ask them to stop. This usually works – if not I contact them again, put on my lawyer costume, and threaten legal action. This is rather fun (though ethically and legally questionable), and so far I haven’t had to resort to Step 5.

If you do all of this you’ll get your weekly unsolicited mail count down into the single digits, which is a considerable achievement and service to society. When I began my fight against junk mail I was not happy with single digits – I was intent on total victory. But I quickly realized that my “war” would never be entirely successful. My tactics were ultimately flawed, for I was attacking the symptoms and not the disease (we’re back to our war analogy, if you didn’t notice). As long as people respond to junk mail, even if only a small fraction of the recipients, the junk mail will continue. So if any of you possess the gumption that I am too lazy to embrace, please feel free to go after the corporate marketeers and the direct mail list brokers, or to educate the consumers, or to lobby government to establish a free national “do not mail” list analogous to the “do not call” list. You will have my full armchair support. But if you’re like me and prefer to leave changing the world to your wife, then follow steps 1-4 above, play hooky from work for 15 minutes every Friday to make a few phone calls, and you can soon whittle your junk mail down to a few letters a week.

The following websites present much more information about junk mail and how to avoid it than I ever could:

1. http://www.junkbusters.com/
2. http://www.stopjunk.com/
3. http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs4-junk.htm
4. http://www.obviously.com/junkmail/
5. http://www.ecofuture.org/jnkmail.html

For a history of direct marketing visit:

6. http://e-sgh.pl/cia/DMhisotry.doc

For the full text of Title 39 of the U.S. Code, Section 3008 and for USPS form 1500 go to:

7. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode39/usc_sec_39_00003008----000-.html
8. http://www.usps.com/forms/_pdf/ps1500.pdf

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