How to stop junk mail: the complete guide

Most households get junk mail from somewhere between ten and thirty different senders. Catalogs you ordered from once in 2015. Credit card offers. Insurance quotes. Charity appeals. Coupon packs addressed to a previous resident.

There is no single switch that stops all of it. But there are four distinct routes, each covering a different slice of your mailbox, and between them they handle the large majority of what arrives. Here's what each one actually does.

1. Prescreened credit and insurance offers

This is the only category with a legally binding opt-out, and it's usually the single biggest source of household junk mail.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the credit bureaus are allowed to sell your file to lenders who want to send "firm offers" of credit or insurance — but you have a statutory right to opt out. The bureaus jointly run OptOutPrescreen.com, the official site for exercising it. Five years is free online; permanent opt-out requires mailing a signed form.

Once processed, the bureaus stop supplying your file for prescreened offers. That's not a request the sender can decline — it happens upstream of them.

We wrote about this one in more detail in how to stop prescreened credit card offers.

2. Mail-preference services

The Association of National Advertisers runs DMAchoice, an industry preference service. Registering tells participating direct mailers to stop sending to your address.

Two things to understand about it:

• It is voluntary, not statutory. Participating companies honor it; a company that isn't a member is under no obligation.
• It covers addressed mail from list-based mailers. It does nothing for unaddressed mail (more on that below).

It's genuinely effective for the mainstream mailers, and worth doing. It just isn't the complete answer some articles imply.

3. Opting out directly with the sender

For any specific company still writing to you, the most reliable route is a direct opt-out request to that company — a formal request to remove you from their mailing list, sent to the address or privacy contact they're required to publish.

This is the route that handles the long tail: the regional furniture store, the alumni association, the catalog company that bought a list you were on. No preference service covers all of these, because most of them aren't members of anything. Someone has to contact each sender.

That's tedious by hand — it's why Ferna exists — but it's the part that actually clears the stubborn senders.

4. Mail for previous residents and the deceased

Mail addressed to someone who no longer lives at your address is a different problem, and it has its own remedies:

• Write "Not at this address — return to sender" on the unopened envelope and put it back in the mail. Do not open it first.
• For a deceased family member, the DMA operates a Deceased Do Not Contact registry, which removes the name from participating mailers' lists.

What nothing can stop

One category has no opt-out at all: USPS Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM).

EDDM is unaddressed advertising delivered to every mailbox on a carrier route. It isn't addressed to you, isn't based on any list with your name on it, and carriers are required to deliver it. No preference service, no opt-out, and no service — including ours — can stop it. Changing that would take legislation, not a form.

If you've done everything above and a weekly unaddressed flyer still arrives, that's what you're looking at. It isn't a failure of the opt-outs you filed.

How long it takes

Opt-outs are not instant, and the delay is on the mailer's side rather than yours. Direct mailers work from lists that are pulled and printed in advance — often several campaigns at a time — so mail already in the pipeline keeps arriving after your removal is processed. It stops at the next print run.

Expect a noticeable drop within about four weeks, with stubborn senders taking longer.

Doing it yourself vs. having it done

Every route above is something you can do yourself, for free. The catch is volume: it's one registration for the credit bureaus, one for DMAchoice, and then an individual request per remaining sender, each needing the right contact route and your details formatted the way that sender expects.

That last part is what Ferna automates. You name the sender; we work out the correct opt-out channel and send the request on your behalf. Your first three requests are free if you want to see whether it works on your mailbox before paying anything.