Comments on: More on the DMAchoice.org debacle

By: jik

jik — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:34:18 +0000

I don’t understand why you would need to contact the DMA by phone. You can opt your mother out of receiving mailings from DMA members by registering her at http://www.dmachoice.org, which is certainly a lot easier than arguing with them on the telephone.

I’m also not sure why you say it’s difficult to find their mailing address. There is a link on the http://www.dmachoice.org home page to a form you can file on paper, and there’s a mailing address right on that form.

I don’t recall being asked for a social security number when I registered at http://www.dmachoice.org. There is no require for a social security number on the aforementioned paper form.

The DMA doesn’t charge anything if you register via http://www.dmachoice.org, and the fee for registering on paper is only $1, which seems quite reasonable given that it costs them more to process a paper registration than one submitted via the web site.

You need to remember that it’s not the DMA that’s sending you these mailings, it’s their member organizations, so blaming the DMA for the mailings is specious. You also need to remember that not every organization that sends junk mail belongs to the DMA and filters its mailings through their opt-out list. You also need to remember that the DMA opt-out list does not apply to any organization with which a person has done business before, so if your mother has bought products from a company / donated to a charity / whatever, they will send her mailings regardless of whether she is on the DMA list, until she asks them to stop.

If you want to stop junk mail, http://www.dmachoice.org is a good step to take. So is registering at http://www.catalogchoice.org and using it to ask specific junk mailers to stop. If all else fails, you may need to start asking individual mailers directly to remove you from their list, as I have been doing with much success for several years.

By: rustyk

rustyk — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:21:33 +0000

These vultures prey on the elderly, who don’t understand why they are getting all this junk, or what it is, and who rarely have or understand internet access. My mother receives about 50 of these items every day, and all efforts to contact the dma by phone end up with dead air. The USPS appears actively complicit (I assume because of financial stress), and attempts to find an address for the dma have turned up no less than four (so far) different ones. Even if a valid address is found, the dma wants to be paid in order to cease activity, and in order to cancel mailings on the website, they require a social security number. Who in their right mind would give this info to these people?

By: ERA

ERA — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:40:27 +0000

First Class mail (has a real stamp on it) does get returned to the original sender, at no charge — returning undeliverable mail is built into the 42¢ cost.

Third class (bulk or ‘junk’) mail is normally NOT returned (even if you write “return to sender” on it) — it is just discarded.

Unless the sender has something printed on the envelope like “Return Service Requested” or “Forwarding Service Requested” or “Address Service Requested”. If those were printed on the original mail, then the Post Office will Return or Forward or whatever, and the original sender will pay for that service.

Most ‘junk’ mail does not have this printed, because they do not want to pay for people like you who refuse their mail. They do want actual changes-of-address, but they get those electronically through a subscription service with the Post Office.

By: jik

jik — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:17:37 +0000

Just draw a line through the name, so that the address is still visible. They are able to unsubscribe such returned pieces from the list because they can look up the list entry by address, and also because most of these mailings have a subscriber number of some sort somewhere on the label, and they can look up that number in their database.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:01:15 +0000

How can they take you off the lists? You take your name off and they have no idea who returned the mail.

By: Holly

Holly — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:00:10 +0000

I found that scratching off my name and writing “return to sender/unknown” not only takes me off their list but makes them pay for all postage fees and keeps the mail system humming. They eventually take you off since they do not want to pay for a mailing that will only come back to them.

By: Jan

Jan — Fri, 27 May 2011 12:07:38 +0000

And I thought it was me….thanks for the info

By: John

John — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 01:16:04 +0000

Thank you for the heads up on the character limitation to register! I had tried about 50 times on various computers, browsers, etc. with no luck. Your post was a great help to me and my longer named colleagues.

- John

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:17:51 +0000

Jonathan:

Thanks for covering this issue. We need more consumer voices focused on this so that we can get mailers to honor consumer preferences. It will be interesting to see what happens this mailing season as the DMACCC.org policies that require mailers to provide information on how to opt-down or opt-out on *every* piece of consumer marketing mail go into effect. Feel free to include your voice over at our blog too: http://blog.catalogchoice.org.

Chuck