In the previous chapter I presented the Mailing Preference Service (MPS) as the first opt-out scheme for junk mail in the UK. Most likely, that is correct. However, it is possible that Royal Mail's opt-out scheme for unaddressed mail, the Door-to-Door Opt-Out, predates the MPS. Nobody knows for sure, as the opt-out scheme is rather obscure and informal.

The Household Delivery Service

As we have seen, Royal Mail started delivering unaddressed mail in 1964. MPs from all parties had reservations about the so-called Household Delivery Service (nowadays called Door to Door), in particular because it reduced "skilled postmen" to "errand boys". However, it was felt the Post Office had to compete with all the private leaflet distributors that had popped up.

During the debates two ideas were put forward by the opposition that are relevant to our current discussion. The first was a suggestion by Donald Wade (Liberal Party) to allow households to opt out of the Household Delivery Service:

Would it be practicable for members of the public to opt out of this service? I suppose that it would be too difficult. There are members of the public who dislike receiving quantities of literature by whatever means it is delivered. Literature without any envelope or wrapping is probably the least popular and the least likely to be read, and literature in an envelope addressed to the occupier is regarded less favourably than that which bears the address of the person. The reason is probably psychological. Furthermore, some people are just fed up with the amount of literature coming through the letter box, and I have some sympathy with them. I do not know whether it would be possible to register people who wish to be non-recipients. That might be impracticable, but it could be looked into.

At this point Wade was interrupted by Godfrey Lagden (Conservative):

Has it not occurred to the hon. Gentleman that if we were to take this course, in households where there were five or six people, two of them might wish to reject this service while three would be eager to accept it? That difficulty could not be readily overcome.

Wade acknowledged the very interesting conundrum and went on to talk about other concerns, such as the effect the new service would have on the delivery of first and second class mail.

The second idea was put forward by former Prime Minister and Postmaster-General Clement Attlee. A few weeks earlier, he had dubbed the Household Delivery Service the silliest proposal I have ever heard put forward by this or any other Government. This time, he wanted to know if households could prevent unaddressed mail distributed by the Post Office with an anti-junk mail sign:

My Lords, is the noble Lord not aware that many people put on their gate posts, "No Hawkers, No Circulars," just to get rid of this nuisance, and if it comes through the Post Office they cannot do that? They are going to have it, willy-nilly.

Baron Newton replied that his understanding was that unaddressed mail is legally a postal packet and not a circular. This was probably incorrect and is definitely not the case nowadays. Royal Mail only has a legal obligation to deliver addressed mail (i.e. items with a delivery point). In any case, the two suggestions didn't get any further than this. How the Household Delivery Service was implement was up to the Post Office.

A secretive opt-out

It were not just MPs who had reservations about the Household Delivery Service — the Union of Post Office Workers and households weren't particularly thrilled either. Attlee had told the Lordship he would be sending any unaddressed mail delivered by his postman straight back, addressed to the Postmaster General, and he reckoned many household would do the same. The Post Office, and from 1986 onwards Royal Mail, couldn't simply ignore the fact that its door-drop service was rather unpopular, at least in some quarters.

The company didn't respect "No Hawkers, No Circulars" signs and it didn't set up a formal opt-out scheme. However, it did maintain an informal opt-out list. If you phoned Royal Mail and threatened to follow Attlee's example your address could be added to the list. The earliest mention of this "opt-out" I have found is from July 2000, when readers of the Daily Telegraph were sharing information about stopping unaddressed mail distributed by Royal Mail. The first letter was a response to an earlier letter, which has unfortunately been lost to time. The writer confirmed that Royal Mail would send you an opt-out form if you threatened to post all unaddressed mail back. That letter got a response a few days later:

Mr Pardoe (letter, July 10) should not rejoice too soon because he has stopped Royal Mail from sending unaddressed junk mail. There is a snag.

Thanks to the Mailing Preference Service I put a stop to all personally addressed junk mail more than 10 years ago. Then the amount of unaddressed junk mail, sent by Royal Mail itself, began to increase, so last year I wrote asking for it to be stopped. But Royal Mail was ready for me.

In its reply, it agreed to my request, but pointed out that it would also mean cancelling much other material that I would need, such as important information from central and local government, including election information, and from other public bodies.

It was adamant that if I were to opt out of receiving Royal Mail junk, all this useful material would have to be stopped, too. I could see no way out of this, so I had to eat humble pie and cancel my request to stop Royal Mail's junk.

The letter confirms Royal Mail had an opt-out service, complete with an opt-out form and information about the potential consequences of opting out. However, it is not an opt-out service in the usual sense of the word. Royal Mail did nothing to advertise the existence of the service. As we will see shortly, even Postwatch was unaware the opt-out existed.

The Roger Annies affair

Royal Mail's opt-out scheme would probably still be as obscure as it was in 2000 if the company hadn't shot itself in the foot. Knowledge about existence of opt-out got a huge boost in 2006, when Royal Mail suspended Roger Annies, a postman in Wales, for the crime of delivering a hand-made leaflet about Royal Mail's opt-out service to households on his round. He had helpfully included an opt-out slip, which 70 households duly returned to his local sorting office. This was the text of the leaflet:

As you will have certainly already noticed, your postman is not only delivering your mail; he/she also has to deliver some (anonymous) advertising material called door-to-door items.

For the near future, Royal Mail plans to increase your advertising mail. This will mean a lot more unwanted post in your letterbox.

If you complete the slip below and send it to the Royal Mail delivery office, you should not get any of the above-mentioned unwanted advertising.

The suspension caused a small media storm. Mr Annies became something of a hero and many junk mail haters were delighted to learn about the existence of Royal Mail's opt-out scheme. Opt-out registrations spiked. It is unknown how many household signed up to the Door-to-Door Opt-Out, but the MPS (which is less secretive about the number of opt-out registrations) reported that figures had gone up by 200k per month.

Postwatch is unhappy

Media storms usually die down quickly but the Roger Annies affair was kept alive by Postwatch, an independent watchdog for postal services in the UK (later merged into Consumer Focus, which was subsequently burned at the stake as part of the bonfire of the quangos). On 30th August 2006 the Daily Telegraph wrote about Postwatch's complaints about the opt-out scheme: Royal Mail kept changing the address people should contact to request an opt-out form and there was no information about opting out on the company's website. A Royal Mail spokesperson told the paper they were proud to offer an opt-out service and that the only reason the service wasn't mentioned on the website was that there are so many of them. The anonymous spokesperson also said this would be rectified in the next 24 hours, which they did. On 31st August 2006 the Royal Mail website got a page with information about opting out.

Unfortunately, the Royal Mail website couldn't be properly crawled by the Wayback Machine but the page will have been very similar to the controlling your mail page from 2011. Anyway, the main bone of contention, which I also wrote about on my blog, was Royal Mail's warning about the potential consequences of opting out:

It is not possible for us to separate advertising material and information that customers may want, such as leaflets from Central and Local Government and other public bodies. Opting out from Royal Mail Door to Door stops all unaddressed items delivered by Royal Mail.

This is the same warning Royal Mail gave the Daily Telegraph reader in July 2000. Postwatch quickly asked for clarification; in a letter dated 31st August 2006 Postwatch raised three issues. Firstly, they wanted to confirm that relevant government and public information material will continue to be delivered:

Currently, customers are not clear on the implications when making a choice and we are concerned about the ambiguity of the information surrounding opting out. Both your website and phone message state that, if a customer chooses to opt out, then they may not receive communication from national and local government (although we understand electoral roll material is delivered as normal).

We would ask you to ensure that there is clear and consistent customer information for (sic) Door-to-Door opt-out which states that, should customers choose to opt out, relevant government and public information material will continue to be delivered and that this is properly publicised.

Secondly, they wanted Royal Mail to make the opt-out service less customer-hostile:

[…] customers have told us that the process for opting out can be laborious, taking several attempts, referring them to the Mail Preference Service, and (sic) would be helpful if you could give some thought as to how you can simplify the process.

And finally, they asked for clarification on items addressed to "The Occupier":

It would also be helpful to have clarity on 'To The Occupier' items. We understand these items may count as addressed and therefore cannot be included in an opt-out.

The third point has always been quite clear, even though Royal Mail's information about "To the Occupier" mailings has always been a little ambiguous. Any mail that includes an address is addressed mail, and Royal Mail has a legal obligation to deliver such items. To illustrate, the following item is addressed and therefore not covered by the Door-to-Door Opt-Out:

The Occupier
10 Downing Street
LONDON
SW1A 2AA

But, an item addressed like so is unaddressed (as it doesn't include a delivery point):

The Occupier

Royal Mail's response to the letter was never published, so I am not sure how they responded to the first two points. It seems, though, that they persuaded Postwatch that things weren't as bad as they seemed. The page about "unwanted mail" on the Postwatch website was updated to include information about the junk mail industry's producer responsibility agreement with Defra, as well as this statement:

Door to door delivery of unaddressed material is a competitive activity. Royal Mail is only one of many operators. Postwatch recognises that this profitable activity helps to protect social postal prices and sustain the Universal Postal Service. Customers are, of course, free to ignore advertising material but can prevent it from being delivered by registering with the Door-to-Door opt-out scheme run by Royal Mail.

That is quite a shift in tone from the letter and the previous version of the page. And they didn't even get the reassurance they were looking for:

Postwatch asked Royal Mail for a clear explanation to see whether customers who opt out of the Door to Door service, will continue to receive local or national Government publications. In response Royal Mail have confirmed that this material will not be delivered to those addresses which have opted out. If Government require Royal Mail to deliver to all addresses, a separate service will be used. Electoral registration and polling material is not affected.

The "separate service"

To the best of my knowledge the "separate service" used to distribute material from Central and Local Government and other public bodies has been used three times. Two of the items were health-related; in 2009, the Department for Health got Royal Mail to deliver an information leaflet about swine flu and in April 2020 we got a coronavirus leaflet ("Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives, unless your name is Boris Johnson"). Inbetween, in 2016, the government produced a EU referendum (Brexit) leaflet that explained why the government wanted the UK to remain part of the European Union.

Please don't use our opt-out service

The exact wording used by Royal Mail has changed quite a few times over the years. Since 2022, Royal Mail's website explains that the company will work with Government to get a message to every UK address in exceptional circumstances where delivery of the message is deemed to be in the national interest. It then goes on to warn that you might miss out on material from central and local Government and other public bodies if you opt out. The opt-out form itself injects the adjective "important" into the sentence.

These scare tactics appear to be effective. It worried our Daily Telegraph reader enough to cancel his opt-out request, and he is not alone. According to a report produced by the DMA and Royal Mail, as part of the above-mentioned voluntary producer responsibility agreement, 198,000 households were registered with the opt-out scheme in April 2009 — less than 1% of all UK households. The report also makes a suggestion as to why the opt-out rate is so low:

Royal Mail typically receives twice as many requests for information about opting out as join the opt-out scheme itself, with many choosing not to progress when they realise the implications of opting out.

To the junk mail industry, statistics like these demonstrate that households should make an informed decision about opting out. You can't just let people go to a website and cancel unsolicited, unaddressed mail with a few clicks — it is much better to have a two-step process that takes up to six weeks and to tell households about missing important information from central and local government at every step.

Of course, they are basic scare tactics. If the government or your local council has something important to tell you then they will make sure you get the message. They won't send it to you in amongst a pile of leaflets from Farmfoods and Specsavers.

Opting out online

There are other reasons why many households never complete the registration process. The opt-out process is long-winded and cumbersome — you have to download and print the opt-out form; send it to Royal Mail via snail mail and then wait six weeks for the opt-out to become "fully effective". If you don't have a printer — and how many of us still have a printer in 2025? — the process is even more painful, as you have to first phone Royal Mail to request the form.

The reason you can't simply opt out online is that Royal Mail feels the need to verify your address. This is how the page about opting out explained it in 2011 (the statement has since been removed):

We will then send an opt-out form to your address, which you must sign and return. We do this for security reasons — to verify that those resident at the address have requested the 'opt out' (sic).

The reason that sentence no longer appears on the page is that the claim didn't make any sense. The MPS has allowed online registrations since 2001 and there hasn't been a single complaint about malicious opt-out requests. And even if the concern is genuine, there is an easy solution; Royal Mail could simply send a confirmation letter to households that have registered. It would be nice service to genuine registrants and it would give households that have been registered incorrectly the opportunity to quickly regain their weekly dose of junk leaflets.

The near-death experience

A question that is often overlooked in discussions about Royal Mail's opt-out scheme for unaddressed mail is whether or not it makes sense for the company to run its own opt-out service. As we have seen, the opt-out started as an informal list of junk mail haters — the Daily Telegraph readers who would phone Royal Mail and threaten to send all their junk mail back. The Roger Annies affair made the existence of the opt-out public knowledge, and it is now one of the official junk mail opt-outs. However, in the words of Royal Mail, the company delivers only a minority of the total volume of unaddressed mail items in the United Kingdom and opting out will therefore not necessarily reduce by a significant amount the number of items you'll receive.

If you want to stop all unaddressed leaflets, and not just those delivered by your postie, you need to jump through additional hoops. The official advice is to also register with the Your Choice Dummy Scheme, which is an opt-out for unaddressed mail distributed by members of the DMA. However, the two opt-outs combined cover only roughly half of all unaddressed mail. The remaining half is unregulated.

Put simply, the problem is that it doesn't make sense for private leaflet distributors to run their own opt-out service. Just imagine what would happen if all leaflet distributors ran their own opt-out service — you would need to sign up to dozens of opt-out schemes. And, you then have the problem of enforcement. You have no way of knowing whether or not a leaflet that was delivered should have been prevented, as leaflets don't usually advertise the name of the distributor.

In 2011, the government tried to tackle that problem. It announced a new, super-duper opt-out service for unaddressed mail that would replace the two opt-out schemes for unaddressed mail and throw down the gauntlet to those companies hand-delivering brochures and fast-food menus to respect ‘no junk mail’ signs and only deliver what people want. This new opt-out service was the ill-fated Door-Drop Preference Service and was part of the voluntary producer responsibility agreement. The service was never launched, and Royal Mail's opt-out scheme survived.

Sticker allergy

The premature death of the Door-Drop Preference Service wasn't a loss. Opt-out schemes for unaddressed mail are problematic for a whole bunch of reasons. The only sensible solution for unaddressed mail is a sticker scheme. If a household doesn't want junk mail they can put an anti-junk mail sign on their door. Such schemes can apply to all advertisers and distributors if it is enforced by an organisation such as the Advertising Standards Authority. The solution really is that simple.

Unsurprisingly, Royal Mail (and the junk mail industry as a whole) doesn't like sticker schemes. The company first confirmed its position on "No Junk Mail" signs in 2006, in the aftermath of the Roger Annies saga. Royal Mail told the Times:

Customers can chose to opt out of Royal Mail's door-to-door service by contacting the Post Office. A note on the door saying 'no junk mail' or an unauthorised letter is not part of that process.

But… what about Canada?

In 2013 someone kindly sent me a copy of a letter from Moya Greene, who at the time was Royal Mail's CEO. In the letter, Greene elaborated on why Royal Mail ignores "No Junk Mail" signs:

1. Royal Mail is not in a position to determine what a particular consumer considers 'junk mail'. One person may object to advertising material from mortgage lenders, but appreciate offers from their local supermarket, whilst their neighbour may have a completely different view. This has to be an informed choice by the consumer, not a carte blanche decision by Royal Mail, which is why we offer the formal 'opt out' service. By signing up to this service, consumers are aware of all the material they will no longer receive.
2. A number of public services, including both central and local government, make use of the Royal Mail Door to Door service to distribute public information and election materials. Our research tells us that most people want to receive this type of literature but observing an unofficial 'no junk mail' sticker could easily deprive them of this opportunity. Again, one person's 'junk' is another person's information.

She concluded that the company has no plans to introduce a scheme which would be informal, uncontrollable and potentially open to abuse.

As I wrote on my blog at the time, a slight problem in the argument is that Greene was Canada Post's CEO before she moved to Royal Mail, and Canada Post does respect "no junk mail" signs. In fact, its page with information about stopping advertising mail is a good example of how a sticker scheme should be implemented. It addresses all Greene's concerns:

How to stop receiving unaddressed mail

To stop receiving unaddressed mail simply put a note on your mailbox stating that you do not wish to receive it. Place the note where your delivery agent can see it, or on the inside lip of your community mailbox, group mailbox or postal box. You'll continue to receive crucial items such as community newspapers, government mailings, and addressed advertising mail.

Canada Post's approach is sensible. They separate commercial and non-commercial items and they don't leave any doubt about election materials — it is worth noting that Greene falsely claimed that opting out will stop election materials. The information is also delightfully easy to understand. Instead of issuing vague warnings about missing out on important information the page simply lists what items will and won't be delivered.

Royal Mail's position on "Neighbour Not Trusted" stickers

There is no reason why such a sticker scheme can't work in the UK. And it is not like Royal Mail is unfamiliar with sticker schemes. In 2011, the company started delivering items that don't fit through the letterbox to neighbours — something other parcel delivery companies had been doing for some time. At the same time the company introduced an opt-out scheme for people who don't want items to be delivered to a neighbour. To opt out you complete an online form and, wait for it, Royal Mail then sends you an opt-out sticker which you needed to display on or near your letterbox.

I suspect one of the reasons for the "Neighbour Not Trusted" sticker scheme is that the opt-out would otherwise be as impossible to administer as Royal Mail's opt-out scheme for unaddressed mail. Royal Mail instructs posties to ignore anti-junk mail signs, and so poor posties have to remember which households are opted out. That is bound to result in mistakes. This is also why the page with information about opting out explains that the company will make every effort to prevent the delivery of door-to-door items by Royal Mail (emphasis by me). Royal Mail simply can't promise they will actually stop delivering all unaddressed mail items, as the scheme is an administrative nightmare. Stickers are a visual reminder that someone is opted out and prevent accidental junk mail deliveries.

So, there is prior art. I have already designed a polite "No Junk Mail" sign based on the "Neighbours Not Trusted" sticker. You can download it as a WebP image or, if you know your way around Inkscape, a vector graphic.