The previous owners of my home had a Chorus box and never cancelled their account properly, or told them they were moving so for the past three years they have been sending me brochures every few weeks or months. At least I presume they didn’t, but all the brochures are addressed to “The Resident”. This blog post is a reminder to myself that I finally rang them on 1890 940 940, pressed 1 for sales, pressed 1 because I really wanted to buy lots of channels and told Sarah that I didn’t want to be contacted again.
Within moments it was sorted and hopefully I’ll get no more junk mail from Chorus.
If you’re getting unsolicited email this document from the Data Protection Commissioner might come in handy but here’s what it warns about those anonymous “The Resident” mail that so frequently litters our doorsteps.
This is the traditional and oldest form of direct marketing. For mail received through your letter box to be considered to be direct marketing it must be addressed to a named person and must be promoting a product or service. Unaddressed mail put into your letter box or mail addressed to “the occupant”, “the resident” or “the householder” does not necessarily involve the use of personal data and consequently data protection legislation does not apply.
You can also opt to be removed from company mailing lists by contacting the IDMA.
Apart from contacting organisations individually, you may also wish to avail of a service run by the Irish Direct Marketing Association (IDMA). Under the Mail Preference Service, if you supply your contact details to the IDMA, it will circulate these details amongst its members. This will result in most of the main direct marketing companies removing your details from their mailing lists.
If only those fake charities respected the law too, we might stamp out all the rubbish flyers that drop through the letter box. Reminder: I really must set up clothingcollection.org soon!
I love this story from boards.ie:
Apparently the postman in my hometown was removing all the spam and advertising from people’s post, putting it in a bag and dumping it in a bog outside the town. Had been successfully un-spamming people for years before he was found out and fired.
