Stop Junk Mail With ProQuo
April 10, 2008 by Guest
Thanks to longtime reader Jess for another great guest post!
ProQuo is a free service which has the primary aim of greatly reducing the amount of junk mail, credit card offers, etc that you receive in your normal snail-mail box. Additionally, they’ve recently added a feature to do the same with catalogues, too (honestly, who still shops via catalogs?).
Your personal information is being collected, bought, and sold by thousands of businesses every day. Without your consent.
ProQuo helps you to remove your name and personal information from thousands of marketing lists, data brokers and other organizations that send you unsolicited mail.
For the most part, usage of the site is terrificly simple: Sign up, enter your information and clicking various “stop” boxes on a very web-2.0′y interface. Since I originally signed up, they’ve even added a “one click” button to stop everything in one go.
Well, almost everything. Unfortunately there still are a few sources of junk mail which require things like mailing in a form, or visiting an external website, but the process is still very simple.
Additionally, they’ve just added the ability to let you add additional recipients for relatives and previous residences, to remove their information as well. This would have been a *very* handy feature to have had 6 months ago when the previous tenant was still getting three dozen catalogs a month. No, I’m not exaggerating.
Visit ProQuo to signup.
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I know someone with a Kitchen Aide Mixer… It’s real nice.
Sadly, an almost worthless service (sorry Jess!) I just signed up. Sooo freaking excited until.. WHAMMY- of the 17 services they say they can remove your name from?
Exactly 2 were removed automatically.
The other FIFTEEN require separate visits to their own websites to ‘confirm’. If I’m ‘confirming” my info there, why did I bother giving it to Pro Quo?
I think this site has potential, but until it’s truly capable of REMOVING me from those services, it’s really nothing more than a ‘reminder’ service of the various companies you need to notify of your wishes to stop receiving information.
Too bad.
Really? I thought it removed from all of those databases.
Plus I added a bunch of catalogs I wanted unsubscribed from, and i got emails from the companies saying I was unsubscribed.
my ‘dashboard’ showed 17 companies, ranked by type (credit, direct mail, coupons, etc). i said ’stop all’ and got ‘additional action required’ on 15.
(check your dashboard to see, if the company still appears, you still have action required.)
i will make one minor note; on some of them all that’s required is printing a form, filling out and mailing in. pro quo does have those forms loaded, so it’s marginally more convenient than going to the company’s site itself would be.
again, this is an AWESOME idea… they just need to find a way of making it more of a one click solution, which is what i expected going in.
Ah yes, I see. I’d pay them like $.75 a source to print and mail it for me
That’s peculiar, as I’ve got a list of 9 things in my “stopped” history (ShopWise, ValPak, Centurylist, Abacus (Division of Epsilon), Publishers Clearing House, Acxiom, Choicepoint, KnowledgeBase Marketing, Aristotle), and 15 items left in my dashboard.
The catalog stopping also appears to be automatic, with only a number on the back of the magazine needed to complete the request.
I would imagine it would require the destination companies in these requests to open up their servers to allow ProQuo to work with it. One could see why they’re hesitant, as every name removed means that much less money.
Other than that, it appears the “one click” shop will automatically print out all of the items for you in one go, but I agree, it would be nice to be able to pay someone else to do it for you.
It’s a crying shame that we, the American people, have to jump through such hoops just to stop receiving stuff we don’t want advertising stuff we don’t need.
Oops, I meant to say “I’ve got 9 things in my history… and I’m fairly certain those didn’t require extra work. Perhaps they did, but at very least this is a comprehensive list to “remove” pages for the various marketing/spam agencies.”
true that.
I didn’t even enter in the catalog codes and i’ve gotten a bunch of emails from various companies saying my name is off their catalog list now.