Royal Mail deliver letters and parcels to your door every day, but they also drop lots of leaflets and other unaddressed mail through your letterbox.
They have an opt-out service you can sign up to stop them leaving you this stuff, but you don’t see this service advertised ever. They make too much money from leafleting for them to advertise how to stop it.
Royal Mail say their Door-to-Door Opt-Out is a free service that will stop unsolicited, unaddressed mail delivered by the postman. Signing up to the scheme is the single most effective measure you can take to reduce junk mail.
Now Royal Mail has never done much to promote its opt-out scheme for leaflets and as a result few people know it even exists. Yet, the opt-out scheme will prevent leaflets in with your post, these are mostly from household name companies such as Virgin Media, BT, Sky, Talk Talk, Farmfoods, Pizza places, Morrisons and sometimes local companies.
There are two types of junk mail
- direct mail addressed to an individual
- door to door mail marked for “the occupier”
It’s the second type that this opt out can remove but the first type will always get through. The Royal Mail say that ‘The Occupier’ type mail is only 25% of the total junk mail.
How to Register
On the Royal Mail website, search on “opt out” and you’ll find how to download the PDF form you must fill in and return to Royal Mail. After two years, Royal Mail will kindly take you off the opt out list without reminding you. So you need to regularly re-register.
The Direct Marketing Association says more than a third of recipients respond “positively” to direct mail, so perhaps some of it is useful.