I gave a small donation to my local food bank about six months ago, in response to reports that they were falling on hard times and were possibly going to start cutting their programs.

Shortly thereafter, I got a solicitation in the mail from them, asking for more money. I wrote a note to them telling them while I was extremely grateful for their service to our community, and while I was happy to help when I could, I wanted to cease any further direct mailings from them.

Six pieces of "junk" mail later, and I now know they didn't listen to me.

Problem is, I've talked to some people about this, and they tell me that while the direct mailings from charities are spammy, they work. If you send out envelopes to people asking them for money, enough of them come back with checks in them to make it worth doing. Junk mail, it would seem, is the price of funding a lot of a major non-profit organizations.

But until someone devises a better system that doesn't have to be fundamentally flawed in order to work, an opt-out system would be nice. Think of it this way: if you give past donors the option of never hearing from you again, you save on the postage it would cost to mail that person. Call it another donation, if you're prefer.