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Mobile app promises to stop old-fashioned junk mail

By John Cook, GeekWire

Most people hate receiving junk mail — those credit card offers, fashion catalogs and supermarket flyers that fill mailboxes and pile up on doorsteps across the country every day. 

Seattle software developers Brendan Ribera and Sean Mortazavi feel the same way, and they've come up with a solution: an innovative new mobile app called PaperKarma.

The free app, available on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone, lets recipients of junk mail snap a photo of the flyer, catalog, magazine or other offer and, in a few clicks, unsubscribe from the distributor’s list.

The company’s motto: “Kill Junk Mail, Save Trees.”

There’s plenty of junk mail to eliminate, with estimates that each U.S. household receives 850 pieces of unwanted mail each year. And a number of other companies are looking to solve this pain point, including startups Doxo and Earth Class Mail.

I was pretty amazed at just how simple PaperKarma was to use — so I followed up with Mortazavi to get a better idea of how it works.

“We’ve spent the past year building up a huge database of U.S. companies that send mail (of) all types,” says Mortazavi, who holds a day job at Microsoft. “For each company, we’ve figured out who the privacy officer is, or who in customer service manages their so called ‘customer suppression list.’  So based on that we send the unsubscribe requests and thanks to FTC rules, they’re required to comply.”

A few months later, Mortazavi said, they follow up with users to make sure the junk mailers are honoring the initial request.

I gave the service a try this week, and within 20 minutes I’d successfully unsubscribed from two pieces of junk mail that always seem to clog my mail box. (Goodbye, Dish Network and RedPlum). A third, a flyer from grocery store chain Albertsons, failed to be eliminated because PaperKarma said it was was "unable to submit requests to this sender."

Mortazavi said he came up with the idea after speaking to Seattle entrepreneur Hadi Partovi, an adviser to the company and fellow junk-mail foe. Prior to PaperKarma, Partovi collected names in an Excel spreadsheet of advertisers that sent him junk mail. The former Microsoft and iLike exec would then spend hours calling each company one-by-one asking to be removed from the lists.

“The idea popped into my head that perhaps we could make this process less painful by enabling people to just snap pics of their junk mail and have someone take care of the rest of it,” said Mortazavi, adding that the environmental aspect of the idea also resonates with a lot of people.

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