Most commercial opt-out services popped up in the mid to late noughties, when junk mail volumes peaked and complaints about junk mail were at an all time high. Before we get to those commercial offerings we should have look at a rather interesting and long since forgotten venture run by Royal Mail and PTT Post (at the time the Dutch equivalent of Royal Mail): the Postal Preference Service, launched in October 2000.

The business model

The Postal Preference Service aimed to collect lifestyle data from millions of people, which it hoped to sell to advertisers. Marketers have always argued that opt-out services such as the MPS are a poor solution to the junk mail problem because they stop all unsolicited adverts. That is factually incorrect — the MPS only prevents unsolicited mail from advertisers who buy the MPS suppression file — but that is irrelevant. What matters is that marketers perceive opt-out services as "all-or-nothing" solutions. To their mind, it is much better to let people choose what type of unsolicited mail they do and don't want to receive. That is what the Postal Preference Service tried to achieve.

In other words, the Postal Preference Service wasn't an opt-out service. Its sales pitch did talk about reducing unwanted junk mail but it was really a lifestyle data mining company masquerading as an opt-in / opt-out service for advertising mail. And, it also wasn't the first company to try to collect data about millions of people. In 1996, a marketing outfit named ICD had done exactly that. ICD Marketing aimed to send a rather large lifestyle questionnaire to every household in the UK, and that was after it had sent a similar survey to roughly half of all UK households a few years earlier. The reason I focus on the Postal Preference Service is purely that much more information about the company has survived.

Ensuring you get the mail you want

To the public, the Postal Preference Service described its service as permission marketing. Within the industry it was called what it really was: a lifestyle data mining company (see for instance the curriculum vitae of Bryan Cassady, the company's Managing Director). The Postal Preference Service collected lifestyle data by sending out millions of surveys that looked rather official. For instance, the October 2001 survey included a prominent heading that read YOUR PARTICIPATION IS IMPORTANT and featured the Royal Mail logo. A brief introductory text explained that completing the form would help ensure you get more of the mail you want and less of what you don't and it promised the survey was easy to complete; you just needed to tick the relevant boxes. The text did not prepare potential participants for the sheer number of boxes that had to be ticked; the questionnaire was twelve pages long and asked hundreds of questions about what people were and weren't interested in. Some sections involved more than ticking boxes. For instance, the "pets" section asked respondents for the size and date of birth of any dogs or cats they owned (I am not joking).

It is also worth noting that the forms didn't have an "I don't want any adverts" option. You could indicate that you are not interested in specific categories, such as for instance "Romance Novels", "Carpets" or "Petite Clothing", and you could answer all the "are you interested in…" questions with "no". But that really wasn't what the Postal Preference Service was about. The service's aim was to make advertising mail more relevant and to improve response rates. Letting people cancel all junk mail wasn't on their mind. They didn't, for instance, mention the existence of the MPS on the forms.

Commercial products

The Postal Preference Service of course sold the data it collected to advertisers. It did so via seven products. The main product was named Opt-in Data — this was the data about what individuals were interested in. To sell the data the company sent information sheets to potential advertisers with a summary of the data on offer. For instance, one of the sheets provided an overview of various ailments people suffered from: 265,675 people wanted information about acid indigestion, 134,532 were eagerly awaiting asthma-related mailings, and so forth.

Data about what people are not interested in is harder to sell. However, there was a product called Opt-Out Data. This data was sold to the REaD Group, which was a company that specialised in data suppression services. (The company name was genuinely spelled "REaD Group". They reckoned the unusual use of letter cases made them look "cool".)

There were a few other products worthy of a mention. Sponsored Questions let advertisers buy survey questions. For instance, the National Blood Service paid the Postal Preference Service to add a question about becoming a blood donor to the survey (they were very happy with the results). Advertisers could also buy the Info Request product, which let them feature their product in the "Information requests" section of surveys.

And finally, a product called Joint Survey was designed to help companies target their customers with their own lifestyle surveys. Among others, the Daily Mirror collected data from its readers (with the aim of selling that data).

Legal challenges

The Postal Preference Service faced some legal challenges in its first year. A press release dated May 2001 (but published in mid-April) announced that lifestyle data suppliers had unsuccessful challenged the Postal Preference Service via the Advertising Standards Authority and the Hight Court. A subsequent press release, from June 2001, celebrates the dismissal of a case brought to the Office of Fair Trading by the DMA and a company called Claritas. Some parts of the junk mail industry obviously weren't very happy with the Postal Preference Service.

The only information I have been able to find about the legal challenges is the ruling by the Office of Fair Trading. The DMA and Claritas argued that the use of Royal Mail trademarks would enable the Postal Preference Service to achieve such a high response rate that competition in the market for consumer lifestyle data would be seriously undermined. The Office of Fair Trading disagreed; they found no evidence that the Postal Preference Service had achieved substantially higher response rates; that the use of Royal Mail trade marks didn't appear to make much of a difference and that buyers of lifestyle data were likely to continue to buy data from their current suppliers. Unfortunately, the decision document doesn't reveal what the response rates were.

Personally, I think the complainants had a case when they said that the use of Royal Mail trade marks would give the impression that the PPS survey had a quasi-official and public interest function and thereby induce higher response rates. Typically, lifestyle surveys are targeted at a specific demographic. For instance, the above-mentioned Joint Surveys sheet shows various examples of lifestyle surveys the Postal Preference Service designed for other companies. The list includes a "reader survey" for readers of OK Magazine, Hello Magazine and the Daily Mirror. All the examples lure people in with prizes (completing the Daily Mirror survey could win you £20k). That is how data mining typically works; you try to trick a specific group of people into handing over valuable personal information.

The Postal Preference Service's own surveys weren't sent to a known demographic and didn't offer any prizes (unless you think of getting more of the mail you want as a trophy). Instead, they sent surveys to pretty much every household in the UK. You would expect the response rate to such a survey to be lower than the response rates targeted surveys achieve, but it appears the Postal Preference Service achieved slightly higher response rates. I have no doubt that this was because of the quasi-official design of the forms. It is extremely likely that a large chunk of the people who completed the survey were tricked. Recipients might have thought that it was a genuine attempt to help people reduce junk mail, or perhaps they took part because the forms looked like a nationwide initiative, similar to the government census.

In fact, the forms share several characteristics with scam mail: it is not quite clear who is behind the mailing; the survey looks sort of official; there is is a call to act quickly (Please complete and return this survey within 14 days) and there are the usual instructions in the imperative form (write in CAPITAL letters, write clearly in blue of black ink etc). But I guess the problem for the complainants was that they couldn't really complaint about any of that. The Postal Preference Service questionnaires weren't fundamentally different from surveys designed by other lifestyle data mining companies — they all try to trick people into handing over their personal details. Perhaps the Postal Preference Service pushed the boundaries with the inclusion of Royal Mail trade marks, but the use of such logos is really only one of many techniques common in the industry.

The DMA also argued that the "negative response" database — that is, the data about what respondents are not interested in — would have a negative impact on other suppression databases. Of course, they were particularly worried it might make the MPS less relevant. This argument was also rejected, mainly because the Opt-Out Data product was fairly insignificant and because list buyers had told the OfT that they intended to continue to use existing suppression databases (such as the MPS).

Going nowhere

The OfT turned out to be right: the Postal Preference Service failed to blow the competition out of the water. It never made much of an impact and quickly disappeared into the dustbin of history. The company was sold to IPT August 2005, which ran a similar service for marketing emails called OK-mail. The new owner proudly claimed that the combined databases contained six million records and that it was growing at a rate of 200k per month, but in reality things weren't so rosy. The Postal Preference Service website was largely neglected, until a new website was launched in 2011. The home page claimed that the lifestyle database now contained over 10 million records, but the growth rate had dropped to 10k records per month. By late 2013 the service had been killed off; the members page explained that the service was no longer available. It looks like they were still selling people's personal data but they had stopped sending out surveys (they recommended OK-mail for people still keen to opt in to receiving adverts). The website was quietly taken offline some time between February 2014 and April 2016.

OK-mail suffered a similar faith. Like the Postal Preference Service the company was created in 2000, and it was also in the permission marketing business — people could tell the company what advertising emails they wanted to receive. It was run by IPT, which is the company that bought the Postal Preference Service in 2005. So, perhaps it is not surprising the Postal Preference Service recommended OK-mail to its fanbase (yes, that is sarcastic), even though by 2013 OK-mail was already dead as a dodo.

OK-mail had launched a new website in early 2007. It boasted that the company was a member of the DMA and to entice privacy-unaware bargain hunters it had a banner that promised users they could win a Volkswagen Golf Hatchback — if you signed up and completed a questionnaire OK-mail would even give you an EXTRA FREE ENTRY in the prize draw.

Postal Preference Service refugees who bothered reading the website's terms and conditions would have noticed the prize draw's closing date was 13th July 2010. Clearly, there was no prize draw — the whole thing was a scam. Perhaps that also explains why the statement about being a DMA member was removed from the OK-mail website in 2010.

In any case, the OK-mail home page still advertised the same prize draw in May 2016. After that the website was taken offline — it returned an internal server error from September 2017 onwards. The domain name eventually expired in 2024.

Moral challenges

The original Postal Preference Service website had a Why Consumer-fair section. Or actually, I should write that as "Consumer-fair™" because, yes, they claimed the name as an unregistered trademark. The page failed to explain how "Consumer-fair™" is any different from permission marketing but it did provide a short and sweet sales pitch:

Consumer-fair™ is about a fair deal for consumers.

Consumer-fair™ is not about being altruistic it is about respecting consumers, giving them a voice, and providing them with real value in exchange for their efforts. They are, after all, the future of our business and yours.

It is our consumer focus that will set our business apart from other data companies.

This is a very fancy way of describing a lifestyle data mining company indeed. The only real Postal Preference Service innovation was the scale at which it operated — the company aimed to dispatch a whopping 31 million surveys. It was an attempt to create a humongous lifestyle database. And that is a hard sell. I mean, why would anyone want to be added to such a database? Are people really that desperate to receive unsolicited advertisements that are more in line with their interests?

The OfT concluded in 2001 that the survey's response rates didn't differ significantly from response rates typically recorded for consumer lifestyle surveys. It is unknown what the average response rate is — the OfT dutifully censored that data in its decision report — but the Postal Preference Service Opt-in Data sheets suggest they got around 1.5 million responses, at most. If they managed to sent out 31 million surveys then the response rate would be just under 5%.

That sounds okay, and it certainly is an insane amount of data. But this type of data has a short life-span. People might lose interest in petite clothing. The large dog or medium-sized cat might have died since the survey was completed. The respondent might have moved house or be no longer among us. Lifestyle data collected a year ago has a lot less value than data collected in the last month. After two years the data is pretty much useless.

The Post Preference Service did encourage victims members to keep them up to date with lifestyle changes, and they were thinking about launching a consumer-facing website. The reason that didn't happen is that, ultimately, there is no consumer demand for a Postal Preference Service. Who in their right mind would create an account with the service to tell them they no longer want to better themselves and therefore no longer want to receive self-improvement-related adverts? Or how about updating your information so that advertisers are aware you now prefer the Aldi over Waitrose and that you are no longer willing to pay extra for environmentally-friendly brands?

As with all lifestyle data brokers, people needed to be tricked into handing over their personal details. Relatively few people did, and the data they gathered quickly became stale. And, when they realised the business didn't have a future they sold it to a questionable list broker. Nobody knows how the personal details of hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people were subsequently used. It is a shady, secretive industry indeed.