My parents donated to a lot of worthy causes in their lifetimes. The legacy of this is pounds of direct mail solicitations, which at this point will never be answered.
Is there a form I can fill out, to mass inform these organizations of their passing?
My interest is in the USPS mail in the USA, but answers for other jurisdictional areas are on topic.
Keep in mind there are two categories:
In the UK, all you need to do is write "Addressee deceased" on the unopened envelope and put it back in a post box.
Incidentally, also the best known way of stopping junk mail for those still alive.
In the USA, if the mail is endorsed with "service requested" or bears first class postage, you can write the reason and the mailpiece will be returned to the sender.
However most non-profits use the non-profit postage rate or "standard mail", which includes no such return feature. Returning the mail to the carrier does no good, as it will just be discarded and more of the same will come.
The USPS recommends using the Direct Marketing Association's "Deceased Do Not Mail" list. See https://www.usps.com/manage/mail-for-deceased.htm for a link. There's also a "Do Not Contact List for Caretakers" in case you are caring for an elder or dependent. Start early, as it takes months and months to take effect. And this only is processed by members of the Direct Marketing Association.
I did find that a few key organizations do most of the list selling. Call those organizations directly, and the mail will slowly trickle off.
Data broker Acxiom has a deceased registration process. The top data brokers are as of this writing Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, PeekYou, Rapleaf, and Recorded Future.
Some time ago, when I was getting just too much junk mail, I had a rubber stamp made saying: "Deceased --- Return to Sender" and just put the mail back in my mailbox for the mailman to pick up. a
Mail began tapering off and eventually stopped.
