Catalog Choice Review 2026: What It Is and Does It Work?

Catalog Choice is a free website, run by The Story of Stuff Project, where you search a catalog by name and submit an opt-out request. Their homepage says they have nearly 10,000 catalogs in their database. The FAQ on the same site says over 9,000. Most of those are catalog companies, with some credit-card companies and charities in the mix.

Donations to the Story of Stuff non-profit are optional and tax-deductible; if you register an account they will solicit you by email on a quarterly basis to help “keep the lights on”. The service works in a desktop or phone browser, and it is particularly good at reducing the catalogs you receive.

There is no federal do-not-mail law, so people sometimes mistake the service as “sign-up, set it and forget it” kind of operation. What you actually get is a directory of mailers allow you to send an opt-out request via Catalog Choice proxy. Sometimes you end up on the mailer’s self-hosted form, having skipped the DIY internet search for the opt-out information, but in every case you are submitting opt-out requests one by one.

Start at catalogchoice.org and create an account. From there you click “cancel a catalog”, type the catalog name, pick the match in the results, and submit the opt-out request. You can store a set of recipient names and addresses to speed up the submission process on future requests.

What happens next depends on the company. Some accept a request Catalog Choice submits for you. Some send you to their own page, sometimes with suggested text to paste. A few ask for your personal email instead. Their FAQ is honest about that last group: once the request leaves, they have almost no control.

If the mailing label has a customer number or a source code, add it. That helps the company find you on their list. The customer number is often a string that starts with C, and the source code is often in a grey or yellow box. If you cannot read them, the FAQ says to leave those fields blank. Many companies process the request without them.

You can save extra names and addresses and cancel catalogs for a previous occupant, a parent, or someone who has died. US mailing addresses only. You can also search a national catalog you have not received yet, if it is already in the list, which is a job a photo of today’s mail cannot do first.

For a national catalog in the database, often yes. People write in and say the catalogs dropped, and cities still put Catalog Choice on recycling pages for that reason.

The labor is the searching and the clicking. Jill Duffy at PCMag tried it in 2023 as a second pass on fruit-and-gift catalogs and wrote that it did not seem to save much more time than writing a handful of emails. That is a fair review of the work, not a verdict that the opt-out requests fail.

Their FAQ says to allow six to eight weeks. L.L.Bean and Pottery Barn pages on the same site say up to 90 days. Catalogs already printed stay in the mail either way, and if a later order or donation puts you back on a list, you search that catalog again.

Be patient. Companies pre-print several waves of a campaign, and they cannot pull your envelope out of the pallet. Any single request can take up to 12 weeks. Catalog Choice’s own directions land in that same two-to-three-month window.

On your history page you can mark a request with a thumbs up or thumbs down so they can follow up with companies who ignore people. There is no statute that makes a catalog publisher honor an opt-out request. Catalog Choice can follow up, but they cannot fine anyone.

If Catalog Choice still works, a lot of that is Chuck Teller. He was a Berkeley entrepreneur who had already done a tour in business software, including analytics at PeopleSoft, and in 2007 he opened a free website so people could cancel catalogs by name instead of calling every company and sitting on hold. By 2012 the service had more than a million members and, in a company count from that year, 8,200 mailers. People who search a catalog on that site today are still using the system he built.

In 2012 he sold Catalog Choice to TrustedID, a commercial identity company, and stayed on as their chief strategy officer. He left later that year. Equifax bought TrustedID in 2013. Story of Stuff acquired Catalog Choice in 2015, and they still run it. Teller died that summer, at 53, of a heart attack on a mountain-bike trip in Colorado. Berkeleyside published the obituary. The big companies buying in is one way of saying the work was real. People still use it.

Story of Stuff is a good nonprofit, and we are not affiliated with them. If you have seen Annie Leonard’s film about the junk that clogs a life and then a landfill, that is the parent. Donations go through EIN 46-4334785. Their homepage leads with plastic and reuse, because that is the campaign people share and the one that raises money. Catalog Choice is the mailbox program they inherited and kept free. MailStop, the paid add-on from the TrustedID years, is gone. The live site is free again. It also looks a lot like the site he left.

Full disclosure: you are on our PaperKarma website. We appreciate the work Catalog Choice does, but we will also point out how we are different and stop quite a bit of junk mail they cannot stop.

Simply put, Catalog Choice relies on goodwill donations to keep the lights on. PaperKarma is a paid mobile app, after a trial. PaperKarma is a technology company, not a nonprofit. We invest heavily in our algorithms, partnerships, people and technology to create a best-in-breed and unique solution to stopping junk mail.

In 2012, while Teller was still in the building, Catalog Choice listed 8,200 companies. Fourteen years later their homepage says nearly 10,000 catalogs. That is about 1,800 catalogs in fourteen years, or about 125 a year. PaperKarma adds about 100 mailers a day.

Story of Stuff raises money for plastic and reuse. Catalog Choice is the program they kept running. The database you search is still, in the main, the one Chuck built.

Use Catalog Choice if you want the free website and the catalogs you can name. Use PaperKarma if you want the list that is still getting larger. PaperKarma has 100,000+ mailers, including charities, local shops, and most catalogs Catalog Choice already covers. We track our success rate at 90%+ of requests received. One account in the app, not a new search for every catalog.

Both still wait on the printer and on the company. Both still miss occupant mail, EDDM, scams, and political mail. Not even PaperKarma can stop those.

Use Catalog Choice if you want a free website for named national catalogs. Search each catalog you want stopped. Add a previous occupant’s name if their catalogs still arrive at your address. Anticipate two to three months to see the mail stop.

You can literally do the same free DIY opt-out for many catalogs and mailers using our mailer directory. Use our white glove PaperKarma app if you also get charities, local shops, or catalogs that are not in that database, and you would rather easily snap a pic of your junk mail pile than search each catalog. PaperKarma is the larger list, the higher tracked success rate, and the tool that already includes those catalogs plus the rest of the mailbox.

Most junk mail and catalogs can be stopped. The remainder is small and defined: EDDM, scams, political mail.