Screenshot : Nick Douglas ( PaperKarma )

iOS/Android: Junk mail is a human misery, a failure of capitalism, a way to lose an important bill in a stack of trash. To stop getting so much junk mail, use the PaperKarma app. Take a picture of the offending mail, and PaperKarma will tell the sender to remove you from their mailing list.



PaperKarma works on magazines, catalogs, coupons, fliers, credit card offers, and even the Yellow Pages. To sign up for the service, you need to hand over a bit of your own information, including your address and email. When you get a piece of mail, take a picture of the sender name or address, and PaperKarma will look it up. (You can also manually enter the sender.) Requests take up to 12 weeks to process, and PaperKarma updates you when they’re complete.



After four free unsubscribe requests, PaperKarma costs $1.99/mo or $19.99/year. If you don’t want to sign up indefinitely, save up and unsubscribe in bulk. You don’t have to save up all your physical mail—the app lets you upload existing photos, so you can photograph return addresses as they come in, dump them in a folder in your photos app, then upload them all to PaperKarma at once.



If there’s junk mail you actually want to keep getting, just don’t photograph it. (I like getting Old Navy sale alerts by mail. Don’t kinkshame me.) And if a sender keeps sending you junk 12 weeks after you told them to stop, you can tell PaperKarma. Show those Verizon mailers you’re not to be screwed with.


PaperKarma | via TechCrunch

This story was originally published in 2012 and was updated in November 2019 to provide more thorough and current information.