If you aren’t careful, junk mail can take over your life. In fact, Greg’s mom’s house was almost buried in it – to the point that when he had to clean it out, he hauled over 14 tons, yes, you read that right, 14 tons of junk mail to the recyclery. Hoarder’s even called us, yes that Hoarder’s. The situation wasn’t a good fit for their show, but this little tidbit makes the point – junk mail can take over your life.

How do you get rid of it? Or more importantly, how do you stop junkmail from coming to your house in the first place. I’ve dug up a few tips and a few of them I already follow, but there is still a lot of tedious and persistent work to do to reduce or eliminate junkmail. And I’m not even sure it can be eliminated completely.

1. Don’t let it into the house – keep a recycle bin close to the front door and drop it in there before taking the mail into the house. (Thanks for the tip, Grace)
2. Write “Return to Sender” on any junk mail that has a return address and pop it back into the mail.
3. Don’t fill out warranty cards, contest entries, or other similar forms unless you want your contact information sold.
4. If you do fill out warranty cards, contest entries or other similar forms – follow the really great advice my friend Janet pointed me to – that says to write “Please do not sell my name or address” on those forms.
5. Use a false middle name (like contest or warranty or Warren T.) or some other readily identifiable information on forms so that you can see the origin of the sale of information. Then you can contact that organization to stop selling your information – unfortunately that won’t help with the organizations who already bought your info but it will reach the “original sale” organization.

Included in the junk mail tips from obviously.com/junkmail, there is a scary, but unsurprising, statistic that 4 million tons of junk mail are produced each year with half of it going unopened (and with 14 tons of it that Greg recycled recently). It is time consuming to take these steps outlined here along with others listed here, but you have to start somewhere, otherwise you will need a much bigger recycle bin than usual.

I’d like to hear if you have used a service like Catalog Choice to eliminate junkmail.