Taperman articles

You have options to control the mail that you receive from DMA and its member companies.
Registering for Mail Preference Service (MPS) provided by DMA and its member companies. Registering for MPS decreases the amount of advertising mail sent to your email address.  

The Direct Marketing Association (The DMA) is a trade association of businesses who advertise their products and services directly to consumers by mail, telephone, magazine, Internet, radio or television.

Such registration might also prevent receipt of mails that you want like those mentioning special offers. The MPS service helps in removing your contact details from the mailing lists of prospective advertisers. Mailing lists are usually functional quite in advance, so the registration becoming effective might take 1-3 months. 

Though MPS will reduce the advertisement mails but a few commercial mails will stop feature in your mailbox every now and then. Those mails would be from companies that are not members of DMA or are those with which you already do business. This service is valid only for residential addresses and not work addresses.

The MPS service works by placing one’s contact details on a “do-not-mail” file that they remove from the mailing lists of their prospective customers before sending the same. In a few cases, even those companies that are not members of DMA might avail the MPS benefits and not bother those individuals who are not interested in receiving any information from these advertising companies.

Another issue is when you receive mail because the previous tenant of the house wanted such information; in that case, the new resident needs to register the former occupant for the MPS in the same way as he registered himself.
Once registered for the MPS, you can stop worrying for five years and after that only, you need to register again as during this period the "do-not-mail" file is regularly updated monthly and distributed quarterly each year in January, April, July and October.