How to stop junk mail

Physical junk mail has a reputation for being unstoppable. It mostly isn't — it just has five different off-switches run by five different organizations, and no one tells you which switch controls which mail. Here is the full set, verified against the operators' own pages on the date above. Total cost if you do everything: $8 and about half an hour.

1. Prescreened credit & insurance offers — OptOutPrescreen

Those "pre-approved" card and insurance offers come from lists sold by the credit bureaus themselves — Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, and Innovis. One opt-out covers all four: OptOutPrescreen.com or 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688). The online and phone routes last 5 years; a permanent opt-out requires printing, signing, and mailing the Permanent Opt-Out Election form from the same site. Per the CFPB, companies you already do business with can still solicit you — this kills the cold lists, which are the bulk of it.

2. Catalogs and marketing mail — DMAChoice

DMAChoice is the advertising industry's own suppression list, run by the Association of National Advertisers. Registering costs $8 online ($9 by mail) and lasts 10 years — note that many guides, and even a stale FTC page, still quote the old $6 fee. It covers "prospect" mail — catalogs, magazine offers, donation asks — from participating companies, with a claimed reduction of about 80% in that category. It will not stop bills, political mail, mail from companies you shop with, or the unaddressed saturation bundles (that's #3). It also runs free registries to stop mail to deceased family members and to people you care for.

3. The coupon bundle — save.com (formerly RetailMeNot / RedPlum)

The fat envelope of grocery coupons addressed to "Current Resident" is the Save mailer — formerly RetailMeNot Everyday, formerly RedPlum, now operated by R.R. Donnelley. USPS can't stop it (see #5), but the operator's own opt-out at save.com/delivery-options is address-based, lasts 5 years, and takes up to 6 weeks to fully kick in. For the competing Money Mailer envelope, opt-out guides point to ListManagerContact@moneymailer.com with your mailing address — we could not verify that channel on Money Mailer's own site, so treat it as best-available rather than gospel.

4. Catalogs one at a time — Catalog Choice

Catalog Choice is a free nonprofit tool (run by the Story of Stuff Project) with opt-out instructions for roughly 10,000 mailers; it submits requests on your behalf, including for previous residents and deceased family members. It is the mop-up tool for whatever survives #1–#3: each catalog that still arrives, look it up, click, done.

5. The nuclear option — USPS Form 1500

USPS offers no general junk-mail opt-out — it delivers what mailers pay to send, and Informed Delivery just previews it. But federal law (39 U.S.C. §3008) gives every addressee one real weapon: PS Form 1500, the prohibitory order. Written for "pandering" sexual advertisements, its quirk is that only you decide whether a mailpiece qualifies — postmasters may not second-guess the judgment. File the form at any Post Office with the offending mailpiece, and the sender is legally ordered to stop mailing you and to strike you from its lists, with the order enforceable for five years. It is per-sender and paperwork-heavy — a scalpel for the mailer that ignores everything else.

The order of operations

Do #1 (free, five minutes) and #3 (free, two minutes) today; add #2's $8 if catalogs are your plague; keep #4 bookmarked for stragglers. Then set expectations: printed-and-mailed campaigns take weeks to cycle, so the mailbox thins out over one to two months, not overnight. Mail that keeps coming after that is usually from list brokers who bought your address fresh — which is a source problem, not a suppression problem.