Junk mail volumes peaked in the mid noughties. If you lived in the UK during these year you no doubt remember the junk mail letters from Virgin Media (invariably addressed "To the Householder") and the endless stream of leaflets from the likes of Farmfood, Domino's Pizza and Specsavers. And, as if that wasn't enough, there were daily spam calls from companies wanting to help you make a PPI claim or cleaning your oven. Marketing had a bad reputation and the industry-run opt-out schemes we have looked at did little to change that.

As a result, lots of unofficial opt-out service popped up in the mid to late noughties. The remaining chapters in this section look at those services, starting with two non-commercial endeavours I was involved in: Junk Buster and Stay Private.

The creation of Junk Buster

As you might have gathered, I was rather underwhelmed when the Your Choice Dummy Scheme was announced. It seemed rather daft to have an opt-out service for unaddressed mail distributed by DMA members if you have no way of telling whether or not a leaflet pushed through your door was distributed by a DMA member, and households now had to request and complete opt-out forms for two separate opt-out services. To try to improve the situation I created a simple web form in 2008. It allowed households to request an opt-out form for both the Door-to-Door Opt-Out and Your Choice, and I also asked people submitting the form if they were happy to complete a survey after a couple of months, so that I could get a sense of how happy or unhappy they were with the opt-out schemes.

The form was fairly well used; it fired off about a dozen opt-out emails per day. It is not a huge number but it was enough to suggest it was a useful service. And, as a little aside, I had to smile when the DMA confirmed in 2010 that only 1,600 household had registered with Your Choice by April 2009 — that was just a little under the number of people that had requested an opt-out form via my website. Promoting Your Choice seemed to be my job, even though I have always argued that the service should be scrapped.

In November 2008 I made a plan for a proper "one stop shop" for opting out. I wanted to set up a "Junk Buster" website that made it relatively easy to sign up to six opt-out schemes. It would let people ask for opt-out forms for three junk mail opt-outs — the Door-to-Door Opt-Out, Your Choice and the Mailing Preference Service and send an opt-out email to cancel the delivery of the Yellow Pages, Thomson Local Directory and/or BT Telephone Directory — these directories were another common nuisance in the noughties. I borrowed the website's name from junkbusters.com, which back then was an American no-frills anti-junk mail website.

I didn't have the skills to build the website myself but a friend kindly helped out. He was Adobe Flash wizard and created a "widget" that could be embedded on any web page. The junkbuster.org.uk website launched in March 2009.

The widget was more or less a self-contained website, complete with frequently asked questions and a contact form. The opt-out section was a simple three step process: you selected the opt-out services you were interested in; entered your name, address and email address and confirmed the details you had entered.

Flaws

Junk Buster had two flaws. The first one was that the opt-out schemes could simply ignore any emails sent via the widget. This is exactly what happened. From the start Junk Buster was quite popular and within a month the DMA stopped processsing opt-out requests sent to the MPS. I found out only by chance — a waste reduction officer working for a London borough had asked the DMA if they were dealing with the requests, and the DMA had replied that they were not:

We are currently receiving a large quantity of requests to register on MPS from a website called junkbuster.org.uk.

We have not processed these requests as they have not responded to any of our communications and we need to be satisfied as to who they are and the service they provide.

The DMA hadn't contacted me at all, and when I asked them to forward the "communications" they had sent they just complained they couldn't access the website from the DMA office. The reason for that was that a DMA employee named Scott Flower had submitted dummy opt-out requests — Junk Buster was fairly good at stopping malicious opt-out requests and had blocked the IP address the requests had come from. Anyway, they refused to process the emails. They viewed them as 3rd party registrations and felt that the website did not provide enough or adequate information regarding the [opt-out] services. I argued that the emails were opt-out requests rather than registrations and that the website contained a lot more information than the MPS website. Alas, they didn't want to talk about the difference between opt-out requests and registrations, nor did they want to point out exactly what information on the Junk Buster website was missing or inadequate.

We tweaked Junk Buster so that it no longer sent email to the MPS. If users selected the MPS the widget instead sent an email to the user to explain that the DMA had decided to ignore opt-out requests (and that they could instead register via the MPS website). It made Junk Buster a lot less useful but it did give me a chance to make people aware that the MPS is run by a junk mail lobby group that doesn't necessarily wants people to use the opt-out service.

Yell and Thomson Local

The opt-out emails sent to paper directories were equally problematic. As far as I am aware, both Yell and Thomson Local accepted the emails. However, the people distributing the books would more often than not deliver the directories anyway. This is always a problem with opt-out schemes for unaddressed mail — deliverers need to somehow remember which households have opted out. I should give some credit to Thomson Local here; they actually made an effort to solve that problem. In 2010, they started sending households that had opted out a No Thomson Local sticker. The sticker was a visual reminder to deliverers, and a rather large one at that: the sticker measured 14 x 10cm!

BT demands phone numbers

BT was more hostile. In June 2011, the company started asking householders who had opted out for their phone number This was the text of the emails:

BT conducted an internal audit and have located details which suggest you requested to cancel your automatic receipt of the Phone Book from BT.

I sincerely apologise for the delay in responding to your request. The details provided within your email were not sufficient to allow us to ensure your "opt out" (sic) request was actioned.

If you would like to opt out of future editions of the phone book from BT then please submit the following details via email to directory.products@bt.com and we will ensure that your address is removed from our database.

Name:
Telephone Number:
Account No (If Applicable)
Address inc. Postcode:

I authorise my address to be removed from future deliveries of the Phone Book from BT.

Thank you
The Phone Book Directories Team.

BT argued they needed the phone number to create a unique record for opt-out requests. I challenged the need to collect phone numbers and the Information Commissioner agreed. The ICO ruled that it is difficult to see what further information, other than your name and address, BT might reasonably require to comply [with an opt-out request]. They also dismissed the idea that collecting phone numbers was needed to prevent malicious opt-out requests: Furthermore, the likelihood and potential consequences of someone pretending to be you for the purpose of cancelling the receipt of the directory do not appear to justify BT collecting personal data to this extent.

BT didn't respond to the ICO's ruling. I continued to receive the phone book, as well as the Yellow Pages and Thomson Local directory. As before, this was probably because opt-out schemes for unaddressed mail are fundamentally flawed. The people delivering these books get paid very little money and just want to get the job done. You can hardly expect them to constantly check a list with households that are opted out. The unwanted paper directories did eventually stop, but that was purely because they were dying a slow death. Thomson Local was the first to stop producing its directory, in 2016, while the last copy of the Yellow Pages was distributed in 2019. BT held out the longest; the final phone book was printed in 2024.

The dead of Flash and Junk Buster

Speaking of slow deaths, the second Junk Buster flaw was that is was built in Flash. This was perfectly fine when the website launched in 2009. But then Steve Jobs' pencilled down his Thoughts on Flash in April 2010. The Apple founder effectively signed Flash's death warrant by not allowing the technology on iOS devices.

By this time it was clear Junk Buster had one flaw too many. I kept the website going for a few more years but eventually it all got a bit ridiculous. I no longer had Flash installed on my own computers, so I could no longer see my own Junk Buster widget! I killed Junk Buster in December 2015 and wrote its obituary in October 2016. Between March 2009 and December 2015 over 43,000 people used the website to stop unwanted junk mail. The database with names, addresses and email addresses was prompty deleted.

The reason I kept the website going for so long was twofold. Firstly, I was hoping to build a new Junk Buster. As I wrote in the obituary, I had come to the conclusion that Junk Buster should become a "junk mail manager". The main flaw in Junk Buster was that it simply fired off opt-out requests; after that people had to hope for the best. That just doesn't work with opt-out schemes run by junk mailers. The "junk mail manager" would instead guide people through all available opt-outs and make sure that opt-out requests are respected. I had started work on such a service — by 2012 I did have the necessary coding skills — but I just didn't have enough spare time to complete the project.

And secondly, it is hard to let go off something you have put so much time and effort in. I guess that is also why some of the commercial opt-out schemes we will encounter in the coming chapters kept going even though the business model was unsustainable. Much as I like to see the back of commercial opt-out schemes, there are people behind the websites. It can be painful to pull the plug on your own project.