Cancelling phone books

We never use the phone book, or yellow pages. And, they're hard to recycle. So, I thought I'd have a go at cancelling them.

It turns out to be very easy. Each has a phone number for ordering extra copies printed in the front. It turns out that the people at the other end are happy to cancel deliveries, too.

The numbers are 0800-833-400 for the phone book, and 0800-671-400 for yellow pages. It only takes a minute.

Online services are available at the Yellow Pages web site http://www.yell.com/ and BT's web site http://www.bt.com/ for personal and business numbers

Encouraged by this (apparent) success, I thought I'd try to opt out of Royal Mail's junk mail delivery service. They call it "unaddressed mail". It turns out you have to email optout@royalmail.com. They'll post you a form to fill out. There's no phone service, for "security" reasons.

For addressed junk mail, you can register with the mail preference service. Funnily enough, these people (who pay to send you junk mail) don't regard this as a security problem! Here, you can register your own name, that of a previous occupier, your own previous address, or the name of someone who has died. They also run the Telephone Preference Service, and the Fax Preference Service. We've been registered with these three services for years, and get little junk mail, and hardly any marketing calls.