When you are starting to go paperless, one of the best things that you can do is eliminate the paper coming into your life in the first place.
A tweet from Twitter user @chicken_scratch pointed me to this smartphone app PaperKarma.
Apparently you can use it to take a picture of a piece of mail, and they will unsubscribe from the merchant’s mailing list on your behalf.
I say “apparently” because sadly, they are US-only and I am in Canada so I can’t try it myself. Here is how they say it works:
We have built up a massive database of U.S. companies that send commercial mail. Using these data, we can work directly with companies to suppress mail on your behalf.
When your photos come in, our system identifies the sender, and contacts them automatically to remove your name. Our database isn’t static, either – with each new batch of photos that comes in, we automatically identify new senders and discover how to submit requests to them.
Looks very interesting. Geekwire has a more in-depth look at the service, and Brad Knowles has a comparison with a similar app, Mail Stop Mobile.
PaperKarma is available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7.
For my friends south of the 49th Parallel, have you tried this out? How did it work?