The Minnesota Attorney General’s office recently produced a resource guide for seniors who find themselves especially at risk from fraudulent junk mail schemes.

From the guide:

Are you tired of digging through piles of junk mail to find bills, bank statements, and letters?  Are you constantly interrupted by telemarketing calls?  If you are, you are not alone.  It is estimated that nearly four million tons of junk mail is sent every year – half of which is never opened.  The Attorney General’s Office offers the following tips for reducing junk mail and telemarketing calls.

Yes, and yes! We are tired of losing actual mail—important mail—in endless piles of junk mail. But after listing several tools that are currently available to help reduce junk mail (including the Direct Mail Association’s own opt-out system), the guide includes this disclaimer:

Your name should be removed from DMA member lists for three years.  (It may take up to three months for you to see a decrease in the amount of mail you receive.)  Remember, this does not eliminate all junk mail.  You will continue to receive mail from companies and organizations that do not belong to the DMA.

Now, wouldn’t it be something if an easy opt-out system actually did exist? Partial, industry-run solutions are only going to give us partial, industry-defined successes.

So, kudos to Minnesota for recognizing the problem. Now, let’s work towards a real solution!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.