GreenDimes Helps Eliminate Junk Mail

I get so much junk mail that it usually can't all fit in my mailbox. Catalogs, mortgage offers, and credit card come-ons (sometimes we get the same offer three times in a single day), 90 percent of my mail is junk. It spills over the top like a clogged and overflowing toilet, and the stuff is just as useful.

Enter GreenDimes, a service I signed up for about six weeks ago to help eliminate junk mail. For $15, GreenDimes offers a series of services that you could probably do yourself, but which become much, much easier if you get GreenDimes to help you. Here's how it works:

First, you register your address and all the names which receive junk mail at your house. Then GreenDimes goes to work, filing letters on your behalf to the thousands of direct marketers to remove you from their mailing lists. That works for credit card mailings and the like, but not for catalogs. Those you have to unsubscribe from individually, so when you get a catalog you no longer want, you visit the GreenDimes website and select the name of the company spamming you. GreenDimes then tells them to cut it out.

For companies they can't opt-out for you on your behalf, GreenDimes also prints up postcards for you to sign and mail to the stragglers like Reader's Digest, who require written notification and your John Hancock. You just stamp and mail them. Finally, you are encouraged to opt-out at the Direct Marketing Association directly, though this costs you an extra dollar.

And that's it! I've been with the program for six weeks and, while it's early (it can take months for catalogs to stop coming), it's working. Some days the postman can even shut the lid on my mailbox now. 

And while this is a mere convenience issue for me, it's also a boon for the environment when you look at it in the aggregate: At the time I write this, the company says it's stopped nearly two million pounds of junk mail. That's significant. Your $15 also gets GreenDimes to plant 10 trees on your behalf.

Best of all, everything is online and easy to use, and if you do run into a problem (my first set of postcards got lost in the mail... conspiracy!) the staff there are almost insanely nice to work with and super responsive.

If you're getting too much junk mail (and who isn't), this is an minimal investment that is wholly, completely worthwhile. Do it today!

LINK: GreenDimes