It would be great if the catalogs and charities OF MY CHOICE would only send me letters or catalogs two or three times a year. Instead of deluging me with paper incessantly.

There should be some way to make this happen...

I received my first ever Fingerhut catalog (in my own name) this year (I thought someone had sent it as a cruel, cruel prank). This opened the floodgates for an entire series of "red state" titles like Swiss Colony and Wisconsin Cheeseman! How many wolf shower curtains, Precious Moments figurines, and 20-ft sausage ropes do you need??!

It's great for us to take our names off lists, recycle mail, or send back stuffed envelopes., but 95% of people won't bother, and the 103 billion pieces will only be reduced to about 98 billion. We need the postal regulations to change. In order to get bulk rates, companies should be required to satisfy some environmentally friendly regulations, such as:

1. Bulk mail must be 100% recyclable paper - no plastic or glossy paper.

2. Bulk mail must be ___% recycled paper -- whatever number can reasonably be met.

3. Names must be taken off mailing lists if there's no verification of correct address within a year. (I still get junk mail for people who lived in my house 15 years ago.)

4. Return envelopes should have a checkbox for removing a name from a list. Maybe a URL also.

5. Mail costs should go up as the amount of mail increases. I don't know how to make this work, because it's too easy to get around, but maybe someone can come up with an idea.

I didn't realize I'd have to spend mucho time selecting catalogs one-at-a-time, slowly. No thank you!!! Also, my order would not process until I selected the more pricey option!!!!! That cost exactly the same ($41) as another service. Does anybody else smell a rat here? With the initials DMA, perhaps?? I expect they will come after me and I will regret posting this . . . those people are ruthless.

I did GreenDimes, ProQuo, the other free site and the DMA. Now I sit back and wait...for nothing. I love it. Thank you.

I heard about it reading the comments over at CatalogChoice. (The comments can be found with their blog). The other sites mentioned in this article were also discussed there. The nice thing about ProQuo is, like CatalogChoice, it's *free*!

CatalogChoice.org is a site where you can pick and choose which catalogs you want--you don't have to eliminate them all. I've already declined *72* (includes the duplicate catalogs with all variant spellings of my name, duplicates to all members of my household) but there are still some I like to get. It's a very easy site to use and it's free. It's only been up since October, I think, and people have already opted out of nearly 4 million catalogs.

Some info and a question:

(1) You can stop getting pre-screened credit card & insurance offers pretty easily. I did it years ago & haven't gotten anything since, EXCEPT for credit card offers from airline mileage reward programs, so you need to contact them directly. Here's an FTC link explaining how to get removed from the pre-screened list: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/privprotalrt.shtm

(2) Does ANYBODY know how to stop the daily circular deluge -- all the ad circulars from grocery stores, drugstores, sporting good stores, etc? They aren't addressed to anyone, and they have a message on them saying that postal carriers are required BY LAW to deliver them. They drive me crazy, and I'm sure my mailman hates hauling them around and trying to fit them in everyone's box. It's appalling that the law protects the right of companies to send that junk out, and doesn't protect consumers who don't want it. Someone told me once that you can stop anything you want if you call the post office and tell them that it "offends" you, but I doubt that would work with non-addressed mail. I feel like it would take community action -- a whole locality requesting to stop receiving those circulars. Or maybe even that wouldn't work, since postal delivery is a federal issue. Does anyone know what it would take to end this stuff? It makes up a hefty portion of my recycling bin every week, since I've been pretty diligent about getting off the lists that I can control. And, yeah, it DOES offend my tree-loving heart :(

I've been wanting to float this idea to aclass action attorney for years:

When someone spends your money without your consent, it's called stealing. In the town I live in we're forced to pay for either trash disposal or recycling, thus bulk mailers are stealing pennies from me for every p[eice of trash they send.

Doesn't it seem like a state full of people would quickly add up to a serious amount of money?

The logic worked for junk faxes. You spend my money every time you send me a peice of mail I have to recycle.

As one of "the tree killers" I think I can clear a few things up.

First, YOU are your own worst enemy with direct mail. Next time you donate to a charity, the NPR station or whatever... ask to be put on the the "do not mail" list or specify that you do not wish to be solicited by mail or telephone. You can't do anything about crap coming in as "RESIDENT", really.

Contact the "big 3" credit bureaus and demand that your name and address not be sold for "pre-screened credit offers" and the like. Each of those companies would gladly harvest and add your genetic information to a database, if there was a vertical market for it.

The true root of the evil comes from companies not updating and following the people that moved/died. I wouldn't mind getting a few extra catalogs and charity solicitations if I wasn't getting 5 lbs of junk a day for people that are long gone. This would calm a lot of people down about the matter.

I've belonged to Green dimes for about a year. They're good but despite managing my account and updating every annoying cataloge etc, I still get a lot of crap. I recommend them but they still need improvements.