How To Stop Junk Calls, Mail, Faxes and Spam

It’s bad enough to receive telemarketing calls and other unwanted marketing intrusions at home, but it’s even worse for the employees of a small business to have their time wasted — the lost productivity costs the business money.  Here’s how to curtail the deluge of junk marketing:

Stop Junk Calls: The national do-not-call site set up by the FTC to stop unwanted phone calls is at www.DoNotCall.com. You can register up to three phone numbers at a time and it takes about 31 days for your opt-out to take effect. You will love the peace and quiet of working without phone interruptions from solicitors.

Stop Junk Mail: The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) set up a website to make it easier for you to opt out of junk mail at www.DMAChoice.org. The DMA divides direct mail into 4 categories: Credit offers, catalogs, magazine offers and other mail offers (donation requests, bank offers, retail promotions and more). You can opt out of one or more groups.

For some local solicitations, you may have to contact the sender directly. And forget about signing up for surveys, product registrations, nonprofit donations, free gifts and sweepstakes unless you want more junk mail.

Stop Junk Faxes: The FTC prohibits soliciting faxes, unless the company already has a business relationship with you. The opt-out phone line at www.DoNotCall.gov stops only unwanted phone calls, not faxes. You can contact the offending company directly, but reports are that this only encourages them, so if you receive an unwanted fax from a company you have never done business with, file a complaint at complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx.

If you are unable to get the faxing to stop, you may want to switch to electronic faxing, (for example, check out www.eFax.com). Instead of worrying about your fax machine’s toner being used up by junk faxes, you can simply press the delete button in your electronic fax service.

Stop Junk Email (Spam): Are you receiving less spam than you were 5 years ago? You can thank the laws and systems that now protect you somewhat from those unwanted daily missives.

Historically, some of us have relied on spam blocking software installed on our own PCs (there are many 3rd-party products based on the open source SpamAssassin project), but now most commercial email services and Internet Service Providers have their own effective spam-blockers. Spam blocking is now built into many popular email readers such as Microsoft Outlook.  You can check your mail reader’s settings to ensure that spam filtering is enabled, and to adjust the setting higher if possible. Also, oftentimes you can “train” your email software or service by flagging spam in your inbox, possibly giving the system a higher chance of identifying it as junk the next time around.  Be sure to check your Spam or Junk folder periodically to delete unwanted messages, and to make sure that the system has not snagged an important email that you actually wanted to see!

You can also avoid increasing your spam volume by never sending along a chain email, because doing that exposes your email address to people who pass the chain along. Also, be wary of giving your email address at web sites you don’t trust, and don’t post your email address to the world in blog postings.  Some people opt to create an alternate email address using free services such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail, to use with untrusted web sites — anytime you need to give an email address and aren’t sure where it may end up, you can just give your alternate address rather than revealing your primary email address.

If you receive offensive spam, you can report it to www.FTC.gov, which enforces the brilliantly-named CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act).