Stop Junk Mail started in 2004 as a local Think Green campaign in my home town Norwich. My idea was to promote a sticker scheme for unaddressed mail. I had worked as a postman in the Netherlands, where they have a sticker scheme that gives households the choice to say 'no' to leaflets and either 'yes' or 'no' to free newspapers. After cheese, liquorice, William of Orange and total football it seemed to make sense to try to introduce such a sticker scheme in the UK.

In 2006, after the campaign had slowly fizzled out, I set up this website. At the time there was surprisingly little information about stopping unwanted junk mail. The usual advice was to sign up to the Mailing Preference Service, which (falsely) claimed to stop up to 95% of all addressed junk mail. To stop unaddressed items, such as leaflets and free newspapers, you could put an anti-junk mail sign on your letterbox but your mileage would vary, as junk mail distributors were free to simply ignore such signs. My aim was to provide information about what other things people could do to stop junk mail and to make the case for better regulation. The campaign was funded by the sale of letterbox stickers and other goodies, such as envelope re-use labels.

At around 2016 the website became dormant. That was partly because junk mail had become less of problem. Advertisers had increasingly moved their budgets to online advertising and the writing was on the wall for paper directories such as Thomson Local and the Yellow Pages (though the latter would survive until 2019). At the same time I had become a jaded. There were, and still are, two remaining problem-areas: the sale of voters' personal details to junk mail companies and the secretive trade in personal data by list brokers such as Experian. Both are issues that get very little attention from politicians, the media and other pressure groups, which makes it rather frustrating to campaign on the issues. You can only bang your head against a brick wall for so long.

Over time, the information on this website got rather dated, to the extent that I might as well have taken the website offline. Instead, I decided to completely rewrite the website. It now has an up-to-date guide; a history of junk mail in the UK and a section with resources I have gathered over the years. The latter two sections aren't quite finished but they are good enough to throw over the wall (the same wall I have been banging my head against for so long).

The old website is still available at archive.stopjunkmail.org.uk. And if you want more up to date content, I occasionally write about junk mail on my personal blog.