Letters and leaflets

I promised I'd look into not properly delivered mail and junk mail, so here we go:
First of all I went to Eastleigh Sorting Office and spoke to the manager.  I explained the problem of insecurely delivered mail, where it was left either in an unlocked porch or even sticking out of the letterbox, and this is what he said:

• The instructions postmen have is to deliver only to the first delivery point, or it would take too long and they'd have difficulty finishing their round.  So this means that the delivery point must be secure.  If a property has a porch where the outer door has a letterbox, the postman will always put the mail through that one, whether the outer door is locked or not.  It is therefore up to the occupier to make sure that the outer door is locked.
• Regarding letters not pushed through the letterbox, this is usually because there is a mail basket on the inside and the letter gets stuck.  So the basket must be big enough to take the mail.
• Anybody who has tried to deliver leaflets or papers to a house where there is a dog knows how perilous that can be.  It can be quite terrifying to hear a dog launching itself at you from the inside.  For this reason, postmen are instructed not to put their hands right through the letterbox, although they have to try to make sure that the delivered item isn't visible from the outside.  Any item left protruding from the letterbox can be an indication that there's no-one at home and therefore  open to thieves. (This is another problem I'm trying to address).
• It's up to a dog's owner to restrain it when the postman calls.

Those letters or leaflets poking out of the letterbox can also be caused by people putting screwed up leaflets partly through the letterbox.  I have noticed that the leaflets delivered for pizza companies seem to be a particular problem.  The deliverers make no attempt to push the leaflet beyond the draught excluder, thus causing it to become screwed up and making it impossible for the postman to put his letters through.  The Royal Mail manager and I thought it highly likely that the postman - or anyone else delivering - would simply remove these leaflets and dispose of them.

So what should we do?

It's annoying to get any junk mail you don't want,isn't it  ?  So I went to the council offices and asked them what they could do about it and they said nothing as it wasn't against the law.  All we can do is to put a notice like this one on the door.  But even when we do so people still deliver it.  I spoke to the lady who put this notice up and she was really annoyed about it.  At this stage, all we can do is to stop the postman from delivering junk mail by asking Royal Mail: Customer Services 08457 740 740  or better still by registering your house online with the mail referencing service www.mpsonline.org.uk

I've seen commercially produced laminate notices saying no leaflets, circulars, salesmen..... but as yet I don't know where they come from.  Eastleigh Council used to produce this:

but it's been discontinued.  However, Hampshire County Council now do this:

which is great for preventing cold canvassing.  If you'd like your area to Cold Calling free please let me know and sound your neighbours out and put it to the Council.  Just because I'm not a councillor, it doesn't mean that I can't get things done.  The Civic Offices keep these laminate stickers and they give you another one for you to stick on the inside of the door:

Sorry it's a bit dark; it looked OK on the phone.  I'll replace it with a better one later.

That's all on this subject for now.