I’ve been a subscriber for 10 years and I rarely use it outside January and February. PaperKarma is a subscription service, and it’s an interesting business model because if it works properly then the more you use it, the less you need to use it. It’s incredibly fast and easy, and it’s the solution for catching all the things that fall through the cracks of the services above. The app will recognize it and send an opt-out notice on your behalf. When you get unwanted mail, before you toss it in recycling, you just launch ParperKarma and take a photo of the return address or logo. Luckily, there’s a very easy way to do that: an app called PaperKarma. Like charities, you have to contact them directly. If you’ve done business with a company in the last two years, they are exempt from your DMAchoice opt-out. Or I buy holiday presents from a business and they start sending me unwanted catalogs. That puts me on a lot of new mailing lists, and suddenly come January I start getting additional solicitations. In December, I make several end-of-year donations to charities. You can find both the online and snail mail forms in the same place:Īll that effort still won’t catch everything. But I think it’s worth the trouble just this once. That’s right, in order to stop mail you have to make more mail. To opt out forever, you have to print out a form and send it in the mail. You can opt out easily online, but only for 5 years. It’s called OptOutPrescreen and unlike DMAchoice, you can actually opt out forever! But just like DMAchoice, they’re going to throw roadblocks at you. But there’s a way to opt out with all the credit bureaus at once. And unfortunately, it’s a whole other list that you need to get off of.Ĭongress gave the credit bureaus the right to share your credit information with financial businesses that might want you as a customer. You don’t need these offers, but they keep coming. Good news! You’re pre-selected for a credit card with 0% interest! Well, just for the first month, and then you’re screwed after that. There are apps you can use for organizing your paperless bills, but the simplest way is to just download the ones you need to folders on your computer for future reference.Ĭheck your paper bills for information on going paperless. Unfortunately, you’ll need to go through them individually to set this up, but it will cut out a large chunk of your physical mail. But just in case you haven’t, you should switch to paperless billing for all your utilities, credit cards and any other service providers that offer it. In fact, I almost didn’t mention it because you’ve probably already done it. Everything else below will just take you a minute or two. But this is the only step that’s a hassle, I promise. I know, I just said that I was going to make this easy for you, and here I am with a first step that’s actually a bunch of little annoying steps. These steps are roughly in order of how much mail it will remove from your mailbox. It’s true that there’s no single way to opt out of all mail, so it does require a few steps to reach Mailbox Zero.īut I’m here to tell you it’s worth it, and I’m going to make it easy for you. Maybe it seemed too complicated or not worth the effort. Maybe you’ve seen articles about how to reach this level of postal nirvana before, but never got the motivation to do it. It saves me the headache of having to shred and/or recycle mail, and is better for the environment. That means that there are many days where I get zero mail. But catalogs? Pre-qualified credit card offers? Charity solicitations? Nope, nope, and only in January (for reasons that will soon be clear). And some legitimate businesses I use still insist on sending things by mail. People I know send the occasional personal mail. Amazon deliveries sometimes come by mail. Okay, the full truth is that I actually do get some mail. When he got to my house he cheerily said, “You have no mail!” and went on to the next house. So I ran down the street with him and helped restore everybody’s mail to the correct mailboxes to get him back on track.Ī few days later, I was outside as he arrived at my street. I was probably more amused by this than he was, but I also felt kind of bad. Now everybody on the street has the wrong person’s mail!” So I accidentally put your neighbor’s mail in your mailbox, and then the next house’s mail in your neighbor’s mailbox, and I got all the way to the end of the block before realizing I was one house off. I Get No Mail and It’s Glorious But it messes things up for the rest of the neighborhoodĪ couple weeks ago, I stepped outside and saw my mail carrier staring at my house, scratching his head in confusion.
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