A great way to stop receiving junk mail is to remove yourself from the receiving end. It doesn't mean the junk will stop coming, but at least you won't be around to see it bursting out of your mailbox. There is a lot of mail that I DO care about, though, like financial statements and the like. Pieces of mail that I don't want to end up in the hands of some nefarious individual with intentions of identity theft.

The first issue in dealing with mail for my travels is the stuff I have stored in shoeboxes, garbage bags, and filing cabinets. It's all the stuff I've saved for some reason, never filed, and don't really need. I just handed my garbage back full of the stuff off to a friend who was heading to the beach to burn Xmas trees. A few months ago, I stared at the pile and realized shredding it with my home equipment would take several solid weeks so I decided some day, I would just burn it. Luckily Kyle turned up with his truckload of Xmas trees and I dumped my bag of documents in with the lot.

The second issue in dealing with the mail is to stop as much of the paper trail as possible. These days, a lot of credit card companies offer paperless billing, thanks to the Internet. Also, as I'll be on the road for a while, utilities (hence bills) can be cancelled.

The third and final issue revolves around doing something with the stuff that still comes, and not all of it will be junk. The post office won't hold mail for more than 30 days (but if you sweet talk them, you can get a few extra weeks). I thought about looking for a friend or relative whose address I can use to forward my mail, and who won't mind throwing it into a garbage bag or storage box until I return to claim it. But since we'll be subletting the apartment, we won't change our address, but will ask the subletter to throw our stuff into a box in the closet. I wonder if it's too much to ask her to weed out the catalogs, coupons, credit card offers, pesky AOL disks, and other junk?