In my experience lots of unwanted mail comes from credit card offers, insurance, etc. Turns out that unless you have an account with them, all these financial service companies get their prospective mailing data through the credit bureaus. However there is a 2003 law that required the bureaus to create an opt out mechanism, which is available here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.
One of the problems I have with websites for official interaction with US government stuff is that, a lot of times, it's some random .com website or a 3rd party with no direct integration with the government entity they're interfacing with. This site has all the potential hallmarks of being a scam, so if I just found this on my own I would have a hard time believing it would work after giving it my personal info.
For sure. Except I don't think this site provides "official interaction with US government stuff". My expectation is that the government was involved only to create the regulation and the implementation was left to the credit bureaus. Which of course are incentivized to make the conversion rate of this site as low as possibly. So offputtingly sketchy is probably a good thing for them.
Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.