UKC

Those irritating sods who send unsolicited credit card offers out have found me again. Despite my name being on the MOPS opt-out they have added a line to the address to make it different...

So, anyone know the rules about their prepaid reply envelopes? If I change the address to that of say, my mum, will they have to pay out for my personal letter and card posting?

Other option would be to send back their reply form in small pieces...

Cheers

Ben B

In reply to ben b:

I used to write deceased in marker pen on any junk mail I received.

It stops coming after a while as

a) They don't like to cause problems

b) Your name and address has been bough as part of mailing list, so the company that sent you the junk will want their money back.

lsn

In reply to ben b:


I've been known to send 2 companies each others bumf.

In reply to ben b:

Another option is to post them your faeces in the envelope with a note saying something along the lines of 'Seeing as you posted your shit through my letterbox I thought I'd return the favour'

In reply to ben b: Might be an urban myth but might be worth a try. Sellotape the envelope to a house brick, post should take it

In reply to Niall:

Yes I do that sometimes. If enough people started doing this then the companies might give up if it cost them too much to process our junk mail.

Also is it an offence to dump the non-addressed junk mail that the Royal Mail hand deliver back in the post box? You know, the sort of stuff that is addressed "To the Occupier" or "To the car owner". After all why should I increase my waste/recycling?

In reply to Ghastly Rubberfeet:

>Also is it an offence to dump the non-addressed junk mail that the Royal Mail hand deliver back in the post box?

No, anything delivered to you by the postman not addressed to you should be sent back for the correct recipient.

In reply to Ghastly Rubberfeet:
You can stop the non-addressed stuff - see here:
http://tinyurl.com/m4lbl

Unfortunately, this doesn't include mail marked "To the Occupier".

In reply to Niall:


Why didn't I think of that? Maybe I'm too crabbit to keep enough junk mail to do this with, it comes in the door and goes in the fire ( I do open it in case someone has sent me a big cheque by mistake ), now I have an alternative.

In reply to ben b:
Got a cat?
If so, buy a cheap shredder and use the junk mail as cat litter.

In reply to lowersharpnose:
>

Did you believe in tempting fate?

In reply to ben b:

I usually remove anything with my address/name/details on it and then post the rest of their crap straight back to them - an anonymous assault on their revenue, if you will. BT are among the worst and I did used to write notes to them asking them to stop sending me offers, but now I just send their envelopes back.

I guess you could try as woolsack suggests and make the letter too big/heavy to go under normal rates to make them pay more...

In reply to johnSD:



Yeah, put a sandwich bag full of sand in the envelope

In reply to Trangia:

I don't think that would be a good idea. Bag of unidentified substance in envelope is delivered by postie, Drug Squad, Bomb Squad, Anti-Terror Police are alerted, news next day of "Major bomb plot averted, we have good intelligence about who is responsible", you get knock on door at 6.00am, wearing hooded overalls by 6.03am. Never seen again.

In reply to the crabbit man:


Still, it would solve the OP's problem - I doubt they get junk mail in Guantanamo...

In reply to Masood:

I'll just stick to my chosen method, chucking it in fire. If I wanted to go visit a hot country I'd like to be able to get a sun-tan at least.

I've recently gone to war with these banks.

You can contact the bank and ask them a) where they got your data and b) where they got permission to mail you.

They are obliged by law to provide this.

I'd bet that your data was supplied by Experian, a big data company that provide mailing lists to the various banks. If so, report them to the data commissioner (google it) for mailing unsolicited mail when you are MPSed.

Also, register with mailing preference service (google it) for the address variation that you are being mailed on.

Oh, and send the mailing pack they sent you back to them in the envelope. It'll waste a minute or 3 of their time to open and cost them 22p.

In reply to Owen W-G:

I must be an apathetic, lazy bastard because I can't be arsed doing tha......

In reply to Owen W-G: Me and partner have joint mrotgage. they kept sending me junk mail "take a bigger mortgage" "get a loan" etc. I rang up to stop this and now they just send the stuff to Rob instead- cheeky sods.

In reply to ben b:

Fact: Companies need customers. One way of getting them is to send
unsolicited offers. If people didn't then respond to these offers and
become customers, companies would not send unsolicited offers. Ergo you,
by this method, are probably benefitting from it via increased volumes of
buisiness done by firms that YOU are a customer of!

Returning the unwantred mail in the pre-paid envelopes simply increases a
firm's costs and we all lose.

Best thing to do is simply accept that "junk" mail is a necessary evil
and recycle it.

In reply to Cobbler: Another Fact: I never accept any unsolicited offers, and if I recall having such from a business I will go out of my way to avoid ever using them in the future. I actively avoid junk mail because of the environmental waste and sheer stupidity of some firm giving pieces of tree to another firm to be driven all round the country before being put in a bin, taken back to some recycling plant somewhere or dropped in a landfill.

It's exactly this kind of utter pillockry that is symptomatic of our utter ignorance, or willful stupidity, of what we're doing to this planet. Saving 20p a year on my house insurance is not important to me; avoiding this sh*te is more so.

Ben B

In reply to ben b:

Well said sir!

In reply to ben b:

I've just created a petition about this on the petitions.pm.gov.uk site.

I'll update you when it's been approved.

In reply to Dominion: Good work, thank you.

B

In reply to Dominion:



OK, possibly more mild than some posters may want, but reasonable:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Unsolicited-Mail/

Title: We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ensure that senders of unsolicited mail provide a method - at their expense - to remove your address from their mailing list.

Additional comment:

Senders of unsolicited mail - junk mail, to you and me; marketing campaigns to the sender - should have to supply either a reply-paid envelope, and a slip with your address details, or a freephone number and a clear reference number for the recipient to quote, in all correspondence, so that you can - at no expense to yourself - request that your contacts details are removed from their mailing list.

They have to cease all mail to that address within 28days of receipt of that instruction.

This should probably only apply to companies that send out more than 10,000 mails per month, so that small companies do not have to cover the costs of providing a freephone number etc

This will save resources for the company involved, as they will not continually be sending mail to people who do not wish to receive it. This saves on both printing - and delivery of printed materials - postal costs, and as such is less wasteful of environmentally sensitive resources.

In reply to Dominion: Thanks Dom, good work.

B