How to remove your personal info from Melissa

What is Melissa?

Melissa (melissa.com) is a B2B data quality and marketing-list company that holds personal records on hundreds of millions of individuals. Unlike consumer people-search sites, Melissa primarily sells its data to businesses for direct-mail campaigns, address standardization, and identity verification, meaning your name, address, and phone number may be in Melissa's database without ever appearing in a public search result. Melissa's customers include insurance companies, financial institutions, and direct marketers.

What is Melissa Personator?

Melissa Personator is Melissa's real-time identity verification and contact-enrichment API. Businesses use Personator to look up your full name, mailing address, phone number, and email address by submitting a partial record (e.g., name + ZIP code). If a company has called or emailed you after you gave them only limited information, Personator may be the data source they used to fill in the gaps. Opting out of Melissa's data broker database suppresses your record from Personator results as well, since both products draw from the same underlying data set.

Step-by-step: How to opt out of Melissa

1. Step 1: Go to Melissa's privacy center. Navigate to melissa.com/privacy to access their consumer rights page.
2. Step 2: Submit the CCPA Do-Not-Sell form. Melissa maintains a CCPA "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" form on their privacy page. Submit your full name and current mailing address. This stops Melissa from selling your record in future data products.
3. Step 3: Submit a full deletion request. In addition to the Do-Not-Sell opt-out, submit a separate CCPA deletion request (California Civil Code § 1798.105) requesting deletion of all personal data associated with your name and address. The deletion request removes the underlying record, it goes further than just a sales opt-out.

   💡 Tip: If you are in the EU or UK, cite GDPR Article 17 "right to erasure" in your email to Melissa's privacy team. GDPR requires a response within 30 days, which is faster than the CCPA's 45-day window.

4. Step 4: Understand the downstream limitation. A Melissa opt-out suppresses your record from future data sales but cannot recall data already delivered to Melissa's customers before your request date. For direct mail you continue to receive after your opt-out, contact the sender directly, they are required to honor opt-out requests under CAN-SPAM and USPS regulations.

Removal timeline

What to do if removal fails

If Melissa does not respond within the applicable legal deadline, file a complaint with the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) at cppa.ca.gov for CCPA violations, or your national data protection authority for GDPR violations. Melissa is registered as a California data broker and is subject to CPPA enforcement.