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Home Blogs Diary 2013 05

Your Choice discovers the wonder that is PDF

5th August 2013

If you send an e-mail to the Your Choice Dummy Scheme – which you may want to do via Junk Buster – you now get the Your Choice Propaganda Registration Pack™©® as a PDF attached to an e-mail. Until recently the Direct Marketing Association, which runs the opt-out scheme, always sent the pack in the post. The new practice isn't good news for Royal Mail but it does make registering with the scheme a little bit easier.

It would be even better if Your Choice would allow you to complete the form electronically. If, after carefully reading about the potentially disastrous consequences of reducing unsolicited, unaddressed mail, you decide to sign up to the scheme you still have to print the form and spend 60p on a stamp to post it back. That's a pain if you don't have a printer and/or a stamp.

For those of us who don't use printers and/or stamps I've added form fields to the opt-out form. You can grab the form from the Stop Junk Mail website; complete it using any PDF reader; and then send it via e-mail to yourchoice@dma.org.uk. No need to print the form, no need to buy a stamp, and you'll automatically have a copy of your completed opt-out form. Ain't technology marvellous? (Please do note that the Direct Marketing Association probably won't be amused. My guess is that they'll force you to print the form and send it back to them via snail mail ;).

Be careful!

As an aside, if you decide to request the opt-out pack via e-mail you may find that your e-mail provider marks the e-mail from Your Choice as untrustworthy. If you got a Hotmail account, for instance, you'll get this warning:

Be careful! This sender failed our fraud detection checks.

I'm not sure what fraud detection checks the Direct Marketing Association has failed. As far as I can tell it's perfectly save to open the e-mail. But if you don't want to take the risk you can now of course download the alternative form.

Last updated: 
8th May 2013