One step further...

I used to have a motorcycle. The wheels on motorcycles can use little lead weights that have sticky on them.

Somehow I ended up with no bike but a ton (pun intended) of those little weights.

Now I don't know if they have to pay by the weight but amazingly, because the weights are flat, they fit right into the envelopes with ease. Two of them puts the weight over the norm and should cost additional funds to send.

I put a note in the envelope:

"While I am in no way shape or form interested in anything you will ever sell I did want to send you this free gift. I hope you did not mind paying for me to send this to you. If you send me some more envelopes I will be happy to send you some more lead. Have a nice day."

Seldom if ever do I receive repeat offers. I did get an interesting call once from a company that offered pool heaters. It was a local company, relatively speaking, in Orlando and the owner called to complain about the weights in my envelope. I told him that I appreciated his junk mail just as he appreciated my little gift. He hung up and I did not receive any more mail from him.

But....

There is another little secret that a friend of mine told me about. I don't know if this is true or not but I haven't gotten any of them back.

Do you ever get those offers with envelopes that are not post-paid? Seems if you don't put your return address on them, don't put a stamp on them, and you send them on in, it is cheaper for the post office to just go ahead and mail it as opposed to trying to sort it out. My friend, who used to work for a credit card solicitation company, basically told me that the post office would bill the company for those non-paid envelopes.

As I said I don't know if this is true or not but I send them in too and haven't ever received one back (for obvious reasons; no return address) and as I said I seldom receive repeat offers.

In my book junk mail serves to fill up our landfills, burdens our postal employees who have to deliver it, and is no different than spam email. But because the post office does make money off of it I cannot imagine it ever going completely away. Making your address less desirable seems to be the only way to get it to stop.