If you are like me, your mailbox is overflowing with unwanted catalogs,and you have no idea how to make the onslaught stop. Americans are inundated with 19 billion catalogs a year. A new not-for-profit Website called Catalog Choice just launched today that lets you opt out of getting such mailings on a catalog-by-catalog basis. (The site contacts companies sending out the catalogs for you). Clear out your mailbox and save some trees while you are at it.
by Erick Schonfeld on October 9, 2007
Wait a minute, two useful website reportings in one day? What’s going on here Techcrunch.
I wonder if this could have been done as a for-profit company with the model being an option on the site to also sign up for catalogs or even e-mail newsletters (the modern day catalog). Companies would gladly pay a small fee for this type of lead generation, and a site that usefully and universally manages what you want and what you don’t is a logical place for this type of service to live.
Nothing stays not-for-profit, when money starts getting thrown around.
Awesome, I have been getting inundated with catalogs from the previous owner. I would guess that I receive 3-5 thick catalogs per day.
I like Mark’s idea above too. I would like to have one place to manage my mailings including magazine subscriptions, catalogs, etc. I would guess that there is a rather large market for this.
One thing that I would suggest to site owners is to have your fill in fields to be autofill friendly. I have bypassed signing up for things because of this, yes I am that lazy and so are many other people.
I signed up about 15 minutes ago and have yet to receive my confirmation email so hopefully the guys are working on this.
It would also be nice if there was a way to unsubscribe from everything. When I get a crappy catalog I throw it out. The current site requires you to type in the catalog name, because I throw them straight in the trash I have no clue what they are. I also don’t really plan on getting them, going to the computer, logging in to the site, and then blacklisting these every day.
It would be nice if there was a way to search for catalogs alphabetically, as well as a list of the most unpopular catalogs as declined by the community.
I was hoping this would help my problem but at this time it doesn’t really help me at I sit here.
Sign up for Green Dimes instead.
THANK GOD! I hope it works!!!
I work on the Catalog Choice site. If you’ve not yet received your confirmation email, check that the email address you’ve used doesn’t use some kind of challenge response system. We’ve seen a number of emails (notably from Earthlink users) bounce with a request that we click on a link because of the spam they get. An email address with a CR system attached is not really a smart one to use when you try to sign up on some web site which wants to send you an email.
A long overdue idea. I love it for the postive environmental impact - my catalogs go straight to the recycling bin.
I did receive the confirmation, took about 20 minutes. I used a yahoo email account btw. Thanks for the follow up.
Funny thing is that in Canada, we hardly get any junk mail perhaps because there’s only 30 Million people spread out over the largest country on the planet. If you’ve ever driven across the country, you’ll find a handful of populated areas and vast distances of beautiful scenery. If I’m running a direct mail campaign, there’s little incentive to blanket the country with retail catalogs. I’m hoping that Catalog Choice works out well.
I think it’s ironic that this posting showed up in my newsreader with a big Dell ad underneath it. Dell is by far the largest sender of catalogs to me, second in annoyance only to the weekly coupon mailings that stuff my mailbox.
When I get catalogs, I pick up the phone, dial the 800 number, and 60 seconds later am off the mailing list. Why do I want to have log into a website and search for every catalog I get and don’t want. Seems excessively lazy to me.
Appreciate this post, and just linked to it galore in our own version at Shaping Youth, titled, “Catalogs: Convenience or Clutter? Now YOU control the reins!” Please don’t prove me wrong, as we get kids’ catalogs galore from toys and clothes to commercialism up the gumpstump, first from the family NOW from the nonprofit! Egad. I do NOT want to contribute to deforestation! It goes against our entire mission…keep me posted with any glitches so I can tell our readers too…many thanks for the find.
p.s. And to add to the comment above, I’d say, it’s not ‘excessively lazy’, it’s cost-benefit analysis…is you can search for all and delete in one fell swoop, so much the better!!! Save some trees for our future, and our children, eh?!
Gidday,
http://www.stopthejunkmail.com has been helping consumers opt out of postal junk mail since 2001, this is not a new idea and it really works if you use it persistently. We help our members more clearly define their shopping preferences and at the same time protect their privacy by reducing the number of times personal information appears on mailing lists.
Of course you can do this yourself, the advantage of using a service such as stopthejunkmail.com is that we have a comprehensive list of over 9000 direct mailers to select from and we keep track of all the historical name-removal requests you process, so you can easily review your progress. You can opt out for anyone in your household including previous owners, plus take your account with you when you move addresses.
Margot at stopthejunkmail.com