Addressed junk mail

By giving your name and full address to The Mailing Preference Service (opens in a new window) you could stop receiving up to a third of your junk mail. You will still receive mail from companies that you specifically have dealings with e.g. insurance companies. This entire process can take up to four months to start and lasts five years.

You can do this online

Unaddressed junk mail

Much of the junk mail that people receive is posted out on a regional basis to every household. By sending your name and full address to the Royal Mail Door to Door service, you will stop receiving some unaddressed junk mail. This can take up to six weeks. Using this service will mean you will also no longer receive local authority community newsletters, although versions of these are available online.

Email optout@royalmail.com

Local junk mail

Put a 'No Junk Mail' postcard near your letterbox. This will help to stop the local junk mail that you tend to get in towns and cities, for example flyers and leaflets.

A junk mail flyer (pdf, 18kb) (opens in a new window) , an opt out postcard and a No Junk Mail sign (pdf, 36kb) (opens in a new window) for your door are all included in a waste reduction booklet, available free to all Dorset residents on request.

Other ways of reducing unwanted mail

• Tick the edited register option when completing the annual electoral register form. This will keep your details out of the publicly available register
• Tell your insurance, credit card, banking and mortgage companies that you do not want to receive information about other services and ask them not to pass your details onto other companies
• Write 'Unsolicited Mail - please return to Sender' on unwanted items and put them in the post. The companies concerned will have to pay the return postage and will usually remove your details from their mailing lists

• Name: Dorset Waste Partnership
  Email: enquiries@dorsetwastepartnership.gov.uk
  Tel: 01305 225002
  Fax: 01305 224961
  Full details for Dorset Waste Partnership