h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not exactly relevant to Free Internet CDs, but I remember seeing an article in a newspaper a while back, trying to win support for a campaign. The idea was that if you got a piece of junk mail that included a freepost envelope you should insert the junkmail in their freepost envelope and post it back to them. Not sure how effective it would be, would certainly annoy the people having to open the envelopes. Then again that's not really fair on them as it probably wasn't them who sent out the junkmail...ack. tsch.
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tom

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I get both ends of this - I receive plenty of junk mail myself, and work somewhere that occasionally sends out (what I consider to be) junk mail.

The best thing to do to make them go away is simply to cross out your address and write 'Return to Sender, remove from mailing lists' on the envelope. Usually there's a return address on the envelope (I think this is mandatory if it's a legitimate company). They will then quite happily remove you from their databases. Although I know of one or two companies that I've repeatedly done this to and they still send cr*p to me - this is illegal on their part.

What doesn't work though, is sending their stuff back to them without the original envelope with your address on. If you open your junk mail, find a freepost envelope, and stuff the magazines/letters/offers in it and post it, it will have no good at all unless you include the letter or envelope that has YOUR address on it. Otherwise, how do they know who it is from, and thus how can they remove you from their databases? This happens quite frequently at work - we get angry letters demanding that we remove somebody from our database, failing to include their address, so we cannot find them in our database and thus inevitably annoy them further by sending them more cr*p!!

I'm dead against junk mail btw - I just happen to work here. If it was left to me I wouldn't send out a thing, but I suspect we might not get any customers then