The year in junk mail

It's the time of the year to look back and reflect. So, here's the year 2008 in terms of junk mail…

January saw the first adjudication of the Fundraising Standards Board. A complaint about the frequency of mailings from Cancer Research UK was not upheld, although the self-regulatory body acknowledges the complainant had grounds for being annoyed.

February was Scamnesty month. Members of the public were asked to drop potential scam mailings in 'scamnesty bins' at public libraries across the country. The mailings collected from the bins was used by the Office for Fair Trading and Trading Standards to chase the scam artists and to educate the public. Every year 3.2 million adults in the UK fall victim to a scam involving deceptive unsolicited mailings, phone calls or e-mails.

In the same month, the company behind the Bereavement Register accused charities of mismanaging data. Research by the Bereavement Register suggested that charities make very little use of suppression files. As a result, large amounts of charity junk mail is send to people who have moved or deceased. What the company did not mention in its media campaign is that charities do have to pay the Bereavement Register lots of money to get hold of the suppression files.

And, February was also the month we started a stop junk mail group on Facebook.

In March we found out that less than 0.5 per cent of British households is opted out of unaddressed mail delivered by Royal Mail. Since, we have tried to promote Royal Mail's door-to-door opt-out in various ways and to make opting out of receiving door-drops from the postman a bit easier, amongst other by creating this online opt-out form.

In April, online directory welovelocal.com started a discussion about business directories being delivered door-to-door. About 50 million directories are distributed by Yell and Thomson Local alone and the online directory rightly questioned whether or not there is still a demand for these books being dropped on each and every doorstep.

192.com added its weight behind the campaign started by welovelocal.com in May, when it launched the website saynotophonebooks.com. On the site you can still sign a petition for a central opt-out system for directories, similar to the Mailing Preference Service.

May also saw the introduction of new Consumer Protection Regulations. The regulations ban 31 types of unfair sales practices outright and closes loopholes that rogue traders used to be able to exploit. One of the new offences is "making persistent and unwanted solicitations by telephone, fax, email or other remote media" and carries a maximum fine of £5,000 and/or a term of imprisonment of up to two years – we're waiting for the first bulk mailer to be send to jail!

Another company showed its dislike of junk mail in June. The Green Insurance Company launched the first UK Junk Mail Awards in a bid to 'name and shame' businesses that excessively use junk mail to promote their products and services. For reasons that have never been made public, no awards have been given out. Instead, the campaign was quietly removed from the company's website.

From time to time bulk mailers take initiatives to make the junk mail industry a bit less polluting. In June, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) introduced a preference scheme for unaddressed mail, called Your Choice. The DMA was more of less ordered by the Government to set up an opt-out scheme for unaddressed mail and unfortunately they decided to set up it up so that it is unlikely to significantly reduce the amount of unaddressed junk mail you receive. To make things worse, the scheme is also about as customer-unfriendly as Royal Mail's door-to-door opt-out. It is not possible, for instance, to opt-out online on the DMA website – although you can now request an opt-out form via our website.

More green initiatives were announced by the DMA in July. The representative body of bulk mailers in the UK revealed that it had endorsed a proposal by the British Standards Institute for stricter environmental standards for junk mail. The proposals, which will not be mandatory and are still being discussed, would increase the use of recycled paper in junk mail and decrease the amount of environmentally unsound laminations, envelope windows and inks.

Much more importantly, in the same month the Information Commissioner recommended the abolishment of the edited electoral register. At present, local authorities are obliged to sell the edited version of the electoral register to anyone prepared to pay a small fee. The roll contains the personal details of anyone who fails to tick an opt-out box on their electoral registration form and is primarily used by marketeers to produce junk mail lists. The Information Commissioner said that selling voters' personal details is "an unsatisfactory way for local authorities to treat personal information". The Government recently announced that it will start a public consultation on the recommendation to scrap the edited register in the new year.

July also was an exiting month for Stop Junk Mail. Using the profits from our sticker sales, we introduced two new products (envelope re-use labels and return to sender labels) and published a new guide to stamping out junk mail (with brilliant illustrations by Eloise O'Hare).

Disappointing was the Government response to our Go-Dutch petition, also in July. The Government has no plans to take measures to prohibit or restrict junk mail, we were told.

In August, the Local Government Association spoke out in favour of scrapping the edited electoral register. A survey of electoral administrators learned that 98 per cent of them agrees that bulk mailers should not have access to the electoral roll. The chairman of the LGA said that selling the electoral roll "undermines democracy, dissuades people from voting and gives people the impression that the council is profiting from selling their personal information."

In September we made friends with the excellent Junk Mail Revenge Day Plot on Facebook. The group encourages people to send back addressed junk mail on the last day of each month.

September was also the month we launched our first YouTube video…

More junk mail research was published in October. This time it was about junk mail volumes. In the year to June 2008, expenditure on addressed junk mail had dropped by an estimated 6.2 per cent. Particularly interesting was the drop in expenditure of Capital One, who cut its direct mail budget by no less than 83 per cent and dropped from the second to the 53rd place in the 'junk mail top 100'. Direct mail volumes have been decreasing since 2004, but volumes of unaddressed mail are still on the increase.

October was also the month we finished our second YouTube video…

As mentioned above, November was the month that the Government announced that it will start a public consultation on the scrapping of the edited register in 2009.

And, finally, in November we made a third video…

All in all a reasonably interesting junk mail year. It is disappointing that the Government remains extremely reluctant to do anything that will upset Direct Marketing Association and that bulk mailers failed to introduce any meaningful 'green' business practices themselves in 2008. On the bright side, a lot has been done to stop scams and both environmental and data protection issues will have to be faced in 2009.

For Stop Junk Mail the year has been a good one. Visitor numbers are up significantly, we manage to fund the campaign, get positive feedback on our work and are enjoying all the nice things that come with campaigning. For me personally, the nicest thing this year was probably appearing on MacAulay and Co. However much I dread the media (is there a spokesperson out there?) it is exciting to sit in a studio and getting all sorts of questions fired at you.

Finally, a big thank you to the many people who have helped with the campaign this year, whether by editing our stop junk mail kit, making videos, buying our goodies, making a small donation or just by saying something nice.