Suffering from the heartache of annoying telemarketers? Overloaded with junk mail?

Junk mail by email, junk mail by post mail, annoying telephone calls from people trying to sell you something at dinner hour, etc., etc. Help!  I’m being bombarded from every direction by people wanting to sell me some product or service.  What should I do?

Things you may want to know…

To get rid of junk post mail, don’t open the envelope, cross out or put a wavy line through your name and address on the front of the envelope (make sure the marks are not so thick/heavy that you can’t still see your name & address through the pen marks). Beside your name and address on the envelope write “Return to sender.  Moved. Remove from all mailing lists.”  then draw a nice big arrow up to the companies return address.  At this point, pop the envelope back into the mailbox, basically your sending the junk mail back to the sender. The company is not going to waste postage sending you mail that is going to be unopened and returned back to them.  You can also call the company and ask to be removed from their mailing list.  I find the return the junk mail by mail process works more quickly and effectively in comparison though.

To get rid of telephone marketers calling you, interrupt them as fast as you can, tell them your not interested and say “please remove me from your calling list”  it is very important you say these words to them. Once you tell them remove me from your calling list, the company is not allowed by law to contact you for 3 years.  If they call you again remind them once again that you requested to be removed from their calling list several months ago and there is government laws and fines associated with calling someone who has requested to be removed from the calling list.  

In the U.S. you can register on national do not call list – link here

For the UK – link here

In Canada the national do not call list will not be available until September 2008. So in the mean time you will have to tell every telephone marketer that calls you to “please remove me from your calling list” instead. If any telephone marketer continues to call you after you already requested to be removed from their calling lists, you can remind them you asked them months ago to remove you from their calling list and tell them you will contact the CRTC and they will have to pay a 15k fine because they are in violation of telemarketing laws if they call you again. If they are still calling you past this point, keep track of the dates and times they are calling you and contact the CRTC directly to lodge a formal complaint against the company. To register a complaint with the CRTC link here. 

To get rid of junk email.  Well, handling this one can be a little tricky as a lot of junk emails come from fake addresses. Sometimes, once you open a junk email it triggers a ping back to the sender that you opened it and then they keep send you more and more junk. Sometimes you recognize the sender of the junk mail and you can successfully unsubscribe to receiving any more mail from these particular companies.

You can also track junk email senders by looking up their IP address and complaining directly to their email server, but this is very time consuming.  You can also complain to your own email server too, but what they do with your complaint, depends on how seriously your email provider takes spam complaints.

Some large email providers, like Yahoo and Hotmail have very dismal spam control.  Plus, the hackers try to obtain email addresses from these sites on a regular basis because they offer such a large email address base.   Some smaller email providers offer great spam control in comparison to the larger email ones, but you will have to search for which one you should use and see if they are suitable for your emailing needs.