US-centric: You no longer have to pay to opt out of annoying unsolicited snail mail: the Direct Marketing Association has dropped their dollar fee to get your name on their mailing preferences list. The DMA’s member companies honor this granddaddy of snail mail optout lists, which is supported by the U.S. Postal Service. I paid the buck way back when to get on the DMA list, and it’s since reduced my unwanted postal mail a whole lot. This dropped fee is long-awaited, great news. See also five ways you can clean up your snail mail.
How To Get Off A Mailing List [DMA]Automated phone bots keep interrupting your dinner with their pre-recorded marketing messages? Play the U.S. Special Information Tone signal for “vacant circuit” when you pick up the phone. Our brother site Consumerist says a reader who kept getting automated debt collection calls added the tone to the beginning of his voicemail greeting: The next time the robot called, it thought it was getting a dead line and dutifully erased the number from its system. Voila, automatons be gone. Some places have autodialers that don’t (or have been tweaked) to respond to SIT tones, but if you’ve got a persistent unwanted robot caller, it’s worth a shot.
Of course, adding this to your answering machine greeting may confuse genuine human callers as well, but that may be worth scaring off the bots. Grab the tone as a WAV file from the Art of Hacking site. U.S. SIT (Special Information Tones) signal: Vacant Circuit (out of service or nonexistent phone number) [Art of Hacking via Consumerist]
So you never look at the contents of your Gmail Spam label, and you don’t want to see the unread count pile up any more? In lieu of the Hide Spam-Count Greasemonkey user script (which doesn’t quite yet work with the new Gmail upgrades), you can set up a filter using the in:spam criteria to automatically mark junk mail as read. For extra protection against false positives, add other criteria to your filter, like make sure the message doesn’t include your name, school, or company. Note: when you set up the filter, Gmail will pop a message saying that in: and label: criteria don’t work with filters, but in fact in:spam does seem to work in my test. Brilliant!
Gmail – Mark Spam Messages as Read [The Quixotic Engineer]
