(Anne was kind enough to send me a paper copy of the issue of the magazine as well.)
So I went to check my stats for Refuse Your Mail and yesterday instead of my usual 1–5 visits I got 84. (I’ve also received quite a bit today so far.) It looks like somebody linked to me from somewhere else and I got a ton of traffic.
The movement is growing…
My hobby web site on sending junk mail back to the Post Office is rather quickly climbing the rankings on Google for relevant queries. It’s kind of fun watching the analytics data and watching people find my site for some very relevant search queries. This project is partly ending up being an experiment in creating a site about an obscure topic and seeing how people find it, which is kind of interesting in and of itself.
I put together a web site with the information I’ve learned about refusing unwanted mail.
Refuse Your Mail: You don’t have to take it anymore.
Maybe this will be the start of a huge nationwide trend that’ll make a difference in Postal Service policies and get major media coverage.
Or maybe it’ll just be a cute site only read by me and a couple Random Strangers on the Internet.
(Edited afterward: This was originally posted with its own domain name, but that has since expired, and it’s now on a subdomain of cooperjr.name.)
I actually received a letter back from the Postmaster today, pretty much confirming what I thought. They said that they have to deliver all mail with a correct address and postage, and suggested I write the people sending me mail to tell them to stop mailing me. I’ve done this quite a bit, but it’s a pain to mail everybody, and it doesn’t stop saturation mailings (where a place pays the post office to just stick a copy in everybody’s box, and the address is just “Postal Customer” so they can’t just not print an address label for me). They also reminded me that I can refuse mail being sent to me by marking it Refused and putting it back (which is what I’ve been doing all along, and no doubt the Postmaster knows it).
In my mailbox today, I have many pieces of junk mail from the past few weeks, marked “Refused”, plus the following letter I wrote to the Charlton Postmaster.
March 26, 2007
Dear Postmaster,
In accordance with DMM 508, section 1.1.4, or any other applicable postal regulation, I hereby request that you not deliver to either of us any mail from any of the following addresses, for the maximum length of time that such an order can be good for. We do not want mail from any of these places, and did not ask for it. Thank you.
“After delivery, an addressee may mark a mailpiece “Refused” and return it within a reasonable time, if the piece or any attachment is not opened.” — USPS DMM 508 §1.1.3
I’ve been in the habit lately of refusing all my junk mail. I certainly don’t want to pay for removing the trash I get in the mail. Why not make the sender pay for it? (Undeliverable first class mail will get returned to the sender, while undeliverable presorted standard mail (which is most junk mail) will get disposed of by the USPS. That’s just a part of the service that a mailer is buying when paying postage.)