After receiving 23 mail-order catalogs in three days, I started hitting the customer service websites, sending a saccharine plea to help me reduce the amount of paper mail I receive, how much I love their products, but prefer to shop online.
This approach got me responses in almost every case, including a few who thanked me for sharing their concern with saving the environment.
It is however, tiring. Hardly any site offers a dedicated mailing list removal form, instead requiring writing to the Customer Service “Contact Us” people or combing their Privacy Policy for removal instructions. Exceptions are Gumps and Brookstone, which each feature the vague subject “Mailing List” as a Contact Us concern; Signals, who goes a step farther and offers “Remove from Postal List” as a subject; Lands’ End, whose Privacy Policy has a whole paragraph subtitled “Removing your name from mailing lists”, and Eddie Bauer, who will remove you if you write online and ask, even though their site asks you to call them or pay $1 to get on the DMA Do Not Mail list.
But then tonight, the local news introduced me to CatalogChoice.org, a free, non-profit service that has done everything exactly right. Wowie, what a great site. It’s concise, cute, has fast ajaxy navigation with slick-but-not-distracting transition efx, and is really really usable.
After getting an account, you just Find Catalogs. I haven’t found one yet not listed (tho if you do you can suggest it be added). When you find a catalog to decline, a Lightbox-esque form pops up where you select your name and address matching the catalog’s mailing label, and enter your Customer Number, if any. Your profile can hold multiple names and multiple addresses, so I can easily pair either Mike or myself with all variations of our address that appear.
Best of all, they do all the work and notify the companies for you! All your declined catalogs are listed on one page, which is also the page where you report anyone who still sends junk after 10 weeks. Each company’s name has a hotlink to their online store, so you can continue to shop at the places you love, but hate their paper waste.
UnlistAssist is another way you can opt out of catalogs/ junk mail. UnlistAssist (dot) com will remove your name and personal info off 40 online databases for 3 years. This will reduce your junk mail and at the same time protect your personal privacy. When your personal information is not floating around on the internet you are less likely to have your identity stolen. You ought to check out UnlistAssist on the web.
@allison: my point was that CatalogChoice is free. The site you’re shilling for wants a fee to do the same work. No thanks.
I am tired of all the catalogs!
@Brent: If you Google UnlistAssist you will come across comment spam on various sites promoting their service. They seem to have started only a few months ago. I have been unable to find any real information from actual customers on the effectiveness or other experience with their service. I also find it very ironic or coincidental that they are in the same city and within the same zip code in Wyoming as Abika.com -an information broker site notorious for capitalizing on people’s personal information.
Yeah, UnlistAssist sounds totally sketchy.
I’m nearing the 10 week point since I first signed up with CatalogChoice, so pretty soon I’ll be able to report on their effectiveness.
I do not want to receive catalogs and would love to have my name removed
@denyse: um, great – uh, *I* don’t do the removing… I like catalogchoice.org so I wrote about it – you should visit them and try it out.
Hi guys. This is Eric Busby, founder of UnlistAssist. Give me a call if you want to know we are legit. I hired some bloggers to help spread the word, that is why you see comments on some blog posts. We have stopped doing that now. I am a real guy trying to help people. We were just mentioned in a Forbes article. The reason we are in Cheyenne is that we value privacy and Wyoming is the best place to protect our own information (as you can imagine, the large data companies would love to expose my data to make the service seem less effective.)
Anyway, if you want we have a free service now too… in fact, I am thinking of making the entire thing self-service and free as that may help more people than offering to do the leg work for them.
Brent, I was happy to hear about the Cataloguechoice.org site when I called a catalogue
to ask them to remove me from their mailing list. So I came to check it out and noticed that most of the postings are from 2007 … 2008 and it’s now 2011. Are they still as good and reliable? Thanks for your help.
Wow it has been that long, hasn’t it! Yes, I still find Catalog Choice very valuable. The site has been continually refined, and I see more and more catalogs listed and even actively participating with CC. I still strongly recommend it.