The amount of junk sitting in most people's mailbox, and then invariably their trash cans is sickening. And the $41 billion industry shows no signs of letting up. ProQuo is a new start-up with a different plan in mind - putting you, the consumer in charge of what advertising you get in your mailbox.

The process is simple. You register at ProQuo, providing your name, address and phone number. You then get to a screen where you can opt out of several direct mail lists such as coupons and weekly circulars (think ValPak) and marketing lists and data brokers. These might include the exclusive offers you receive for the low APR credit cards that balloon up after the intro period or if you make a late payment.

ProQuo makes it easy for you to opt out of all of them with a convenient "stop all" button. When you press this button, some of the nasty offenders do go away, kind of like bugs seeing Raid for the first time. Unfortunately, there's more work involved for others.

For example, the Consumer Credit Reporting companies (Experian, TransUnion, Innovis and Equifax) require further action. This means you are shunted off to their website where you click yes to opting out and then you get a screen which tells you to print out the confirmation page and mail it in. A hassle but most likely worth the aggravation.

The service is free and in return, ProQuo will allow advertisers to market their services in the event you want to "opt-in" for some new offers. (Yeah, right). In return, ProQuo will make money from the ads. Here's the good news. They won't directly solicit customers. They will only passively shill the offers on their website which they hope you return to, to continue your fight against junk mail.

Other junk mail eliminator services such as GreenDimes, 41Pounds and StopTheJunkMail charge a fee for their services.

According to ProQuo you can expect to eliminate between 50-90% of the junk mail using their service. You will see results in 4 weeks and the full impact in 3 months. Currently, ProQuo blocks 16 different junk mail companies and hopes to add more to their list.