Sunday, March 16, 2014

PaperKarma An App to Stop Paper



A common problem for most everyone these days is paper junk mail.  This app is an attempt to stop it easily, one piece at a time. You photograph the address label on some piece of junk mail you wish to stop receiving, and the app will go to work, find the company and tell them to remove you from the mailing list.  Or, that’s the concept.  Works on Android and iOS.

It does have a decent rating in the App Store (Apple’s) but only 140 reviews.  I believe it requires you to give your mailing address and some email address (doesn’t have to be your main one) and create a password.  It will then email you when it has removed your name from some vendor’s mailing list.

I do this activity the hard way right now, by faxing the address label to junk mailers, with bold “remove my name” written under it.  However, finding a fax number to use is sometimes difficult or impossible, and if you have to resort to finding the fax number on line, it is too time consuming.  And if you mail a request to be dropped the stamp costs $ .47 or something like that.  Why pay to say “no” ?

An earlier effort, called MailStop APP, appears to have been purchased by Trusted ID, but the website is vague on how to use it, possibly you have to be a client of Trusted ID’s identity theft company.

Since photographing a check is now sufficient to make a bank deposit, I am sure that we will someday be able to photo address labels on junk mail and let some company use it to stop the flood. This might be the one if they improve the data base, get more users, and perfect the app a little more.  Your comments ?

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