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7 Days In Email Hell
jfruhlinger writes "If you first went on line in the '90s, you probably remember a time when every e-mail you received was exciting, or at least relevant, and was worthy of your personal attention. One brave writer decided to take that approach to his present-day overflowing inbox. He read every email he received and dealt with them all, either by replying, filing, or unsubscribing. He even scanned his spam filter for false positives. It was a lot harder than he thought it would be."
*Thought it would be. Please check your spelling next time.
If this was an email, I'd instinctively delete it.
As far as I have used email (early 90s) spam has been an issue. I think I get less junk now than I used to get in 1995, thanks to advancements in server side junk mail filters.
Funny, this sounds just like my email experience. What are you all doing wrong?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Umm... I do this every day. My inbox is always at zero after the first 30 minutes I'm at work.
Email is either processed (task/ticket opened or replied if it takes a trivial amount of time), deleted, or archived.
This is why I have 3 accounts.
1).One that goes for the really important stuff. IE Financial related stuff and my family. No one else gets it.
2.) The one that I give to friends and sign up for things online that I really want, are legitimate online retailers I use a lot. Might be spammed, but probably not.
3.) Everything else, IE Anything sketchy, porn, places I may or may not visit again, etc.
Pretty much anything I'm not expecting from the 3rd one goes straight to the round file, and after a day of my filter learning to deal with the latest influx of crap from whatever trash I've signed up for recently I don't even have to mess with it anymore. The 2nd one rarely gets gets a handful of spam each week, and the first one gets 1 or 2 spam mails a month.
People that get that much email get it solely to make themselves feel important. They walk around telling all their friends about the 400 emails they got today. They are the same people that have 30,000 friends on Facebook and think they really do have 30,000 friends.
I've been getting email for over 17 years and I've never gotten that much in a day short of when I was active on various mailing lists. Even then, i didn't get that much.
Stop giving your email address out to every bozo website that wants it and spam will virtually disappear. Stop subscribing for every stupid news feed and commercial website and your mailbox won't fill up. I've had the same address for 3 years at this point and I get 15-30 emails a day, most of which are important and valid. The ones that aren't are from my mom.
And I don't get any spam. Seriously. I don't do any crazy shit to avoid it either, I use gmail and sometimes stuff gets put in the spam folder even though it's not so I set up a rule to check if something "is:spam" and then tell it to never move that to spam. Because I get no spam. Am I doing something wrong?
"You Have Mail!"
I've been using the same main email address since 1995, posted it on several boards and usenet, it used to be my eBay username until they got all draconian about interaction between users and I was forced to change it, yet today I get roughly the same amount of email as I did 10-15 years ago.
There was a time when spammers did acknowledge when you returned an unsubscribe email but that didn't last long as they soon discovered it was an excellent way to find out wether your email address was 'live'.
My ISP uses a major email filtering service which does (I'm guessing) remove a lot of spam and I use mailwasher to filter everything else but that's not to say I've never had problems with an overflowing inbox, I have been Joe-Jobbed in the past and that was an interesting time, receiving thousands of bounced emails daily for quite a while meant I had some serious hand-filtering to do as this was before ISP-level spam filtering was available and I had mail delivered by SMTP because I was on a static IP with the ISP meaning I could 'properly' bounce email.
If I'd followed the spam I received over the years I would have a closet full of university diplomas, a harem of Russian wives and a 5 foot long dick that would never go soft!
This is why everyone should have their own domain.
I have catch-all email for my domain, so if an email is sent to it that isn't recognized, it goes into my catchall account.
The nice part of this, is I can create 'newegg@domain.com', and I know exactly who sent it, and/or who shared out my contact information.
You can do throw-away emails for single event cases, or just use a generic 'junk@domain.com' for sites you don't care about.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Amusingly, you can take the old "X Windows - Dangerous Virus" poster from 20+ years ago and take all the sluglines at the bottom and s/X Windows/Lotus Notes/g, and THEY ALL APPLY. Its eerie.
He's on too many mailing lists and has never filtered down the information he gets to something manageable.
I don't delete stuff from my inbox. If I've read it, that's fine, but it's perfectly acceptable for me to just search when I need something particular. In ancient times I used to make folders that were months (or years) when I got stuff, but that was an artificial structure, and not particularly useful.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Forward this mail to your contacts lists, or I won't eat my breakfast cereal anymore!
Stop using an email provider who also specializes in facilitating advertising, data mining, and, oh yeah, search
~dlb.
Two years ago I gave up on email and facebook and after two years I have no desire to go back. Friends still call when they want to get together but now the computer is for joy and fun things, not a daily grind to keep up on the minutia of everyone's lives. At the very least, I encourage you to try it for a week to see how liberating it really is.
Dammit...keep getting these Goatse emails from someone named CDR Taco.
... monster.com & careerbuilder.com
What else can you do? Gotta feed the family somehow.
I don't understand people who obsessively have to delete stuff in their Inbox.
OK, so you want a clean Inbox. Fine. Delete junk/spam.
For the rest, stuff like:
-sales leads
-your boss saying "Do X"
-your colleagues telling you why they can do Y, upon which X depends
-vendors with pricing/other info
-customer complaints which you reply to
why would you want to delete it? It doesn't take up space in a filing cabinet. You'll be hard pressed to come up with more than a few hundred MB of email in a year, the size of an average PowerPoint, I guess.
And if you ever need to explain why X isn't done already, you could just forward an email, if you hadn't wiped it.
So move it to different folders ("Sales Leads", "Projects", whatever). And archive it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
WTF was that modded to -1? It's perfectly true. Maybe uncomfortably true for some people?
No, it's almost impossible. Not with everyone and their dog getting spambot malware on their systems. It'd be very, very unlikely that one's family and friends are all extremely tech-literate, to the extent that they get no malware at all, over a course of more than a decade. I find it pretty much an unbelievable scenario.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
As I've noticed with most of my friends and a few of the comment I see that a lot of people use multiple e-mail account for different things. I’ve only had my 1 e-mail account since back in 99 when I needed an e-mail account and I got one free from hotmail. I think just from the top of my head I’ve got about 8 or so e-mails accounts, most free e-mail accounts that I’ve gotten for 1 reason or another and a few of them from my ISP that gives them to my freely.
I only use one, just one e-mail account the at all times I have used two at one point because I wanted to create a more professional e-mail using gmail so I could apply for resumes and not use my e-mail that I normally have that to some people would be considered non professional. Over the years of using only one account all the time I’ve noticed that during the winter I get more spam than I do during the summer, and if you unsubscribe to e-mails you end up getting more in the end result.
Now I used to be an MSN plus member and when I used the service for a whole year and a half I think I got about 2-3 spam messages every 2 weeks when I stopped paying MSN money I notice I would get about 10-20 a day. In the last few months I’ve recently gone though and checked on websites I’ve sign up for and deleted the accounts. 60% of them being forums I never go to anymore and others being websites that required my information to make a user to view their content. Now I haven’t signed up for anything in the last 4-5 months and I get about 1-7 spam messages a day, and not a single one gets in to my inbox they just show up in my junk mail, I check to see if it's legit or not and remove them.
Out of all the other e-mail accounts I never use the only ones that I’ve notice that get any kind of spam are my two g-mail accounts. One I’ve got on my resume and another I’ve had since they started the service but have never given it out. That one gets 30-100 spam messages a day, I have no idea why and it makes no senses to me what so ever since I’ve never used it for anything other than having an account to sign in with using Google.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
Also Yahoo provides free disposable addresses. You can have 500 free active addresses and then just delete some old ones if you need new ones. Those also clearly identify the service those are linked to. So it's easy to know when something leaks. I got really worried when I started to get spam to email address that I had only given to one bank. It makes you think, about customer information security. Yahoo disposable addresses
this isn't a radical concept... I've done it for years. It's called "zero inbox". If you're a Sys Admin, I highly recommend this book: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836 It covers the idea, and it's where I picked it up.
Well, shit. You don't get 400 emails a day, and you think anyone who does, is a jerk who hands out their email...
I get 400 emails a day. Why? Because I manage 5 corporate projects at a time. Because I'm a part of another five international teams. And so on-- I'm not even thinking of the mailing lists, many of which attach to projects and groups to whom I have specific responsibilities. 50 personal emails in a day, is not unheard of.
So fine-- it doesn't apply to you. Don't be an utter asshole and assume because you don't have an overload problem, that anyone and everyone who does, is twittering on FaceBook or the like. Many people simply have too much to deal with.
I briefly consider sticking them in a folder called "email I already read and don't know what to do with but better not delete in case one day I really need it." But then isn't "inbox" just a more elegant way of saying the same thing?
Since he's using Gmail, the big Archive button does the same thing, but better.
I don't get spam.
My school/work address has a pretty good spam filter anyway, but I have the option to disallow third parties from obtaining my email address via the university. Between those two, I get maybe 5 filtered messages a month in my junk email folder at school/work (same place).
At my own domain, I have my junk filter to blacklist any incoming address. I either read the message from the spam folder (without javascript and other nonsense), or if it's someone I want to hear from I whitelist the address (or domain). My spam folder has 650+ messages in it, 99% of which I never open.
I get a lot of work related status messages-- this server is down, so and so changed shifts, meetings or training coming up (although most meetings are just added to my calendar these days), new features added, etc. I have many of those filtered on the server because I really don't need to do anything with them when they come in.
It is rare that I need to reply to an email, and when I do it's usually a yes or no answer rather than a conversation. I think the last email conversation I had was in 2003. That's probably the last time I was on a non-work related high-traffic mailing list, too. Conversations now are via texting, Facebook, or Twitter; rarely by phone.
You're not supposed to read every email. I haven't done that in years. In an average day, I might read 5-6 messages. I scan subjects. Newsletters and such I read on the web, usually through Google Reader.
Author of TFA was either BS'ing to sell advertising space or BS'ing to get on /.
OR, the author of TFA is far enough behind the times that he still hasn't mastered this online communication thing yet. Perhaps he should ask his kids for help.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Thats why I use eat spam service like mailinator ...
How can this guy get so much email? Here's the clue:
and this:
-- why doesn't he use a web form for booking?
Why does he subscribe to that crap? Ever heard of feeds? Don't abuse email for broadcast.
Guess what, an inbox is not an addressbook. Why don't you save contacts to your addressbook? Very easy if it's a vCard.
Also, ever heard of tags and folders? I keep all nonspam email, but not in my inbox ffs. My inbox is empty most of the time. As soon as I see a fresh email in my inbox, I move/tag it or delete it. Why doesn't he at least set up some filters for his fucking newsletters to auto-move them to the corresponding folder?
Better question: How can he routinely leave email unanswered without losing all his friends and business contacts?
I mean, he ends up at reading the subject of every email (check), and scanning through his spam to see if there are false positives (check). My ham volume is about as large as his, and my spam volume is significantly lower (ca. 30%) because I've got a good spam filter.
I don't see what the big deal is.
Yeah, well, if you're subscribed to 40-odd e-newsletters and have 22,342 unread mails then you do have a problem. The problem is: thinking the world ends when you don't do everything. Thinking you're soooo important that you need to be current with everything.
Guess what. It doesn't and you're not.
This is for all the people who never figured out how to manage their e-mail.
- Disable the automatic deletion of e-mail from the Deleted Items folder and do not use manual deletion.
- Delete any read items from the Inbox that you read and do not need to act on.
- Leave any items in the Inbox that you need to act on (e.g. reply, perform a task, etc.)
- Once you acted on that e-mail delete it from your Inbox.
- Setup Auto Archiving on your Deleted Items folder to move the items from there to a separate Archive folder to keep your read e-mails there.
Just do these simple steps and your Inbox will be clean and your mail administrators will thank you and your mailbox won't explode or fill-up.
If you want to get more out of your e-mail then start setting up rules, folders, tags, searching, etc. to really get as much out of it as you can and make your online life easier.
For Evolution I wrote a wrapper round bogofilter. The Evolution attitude to external scripts is dumb by the way.
For Thunderbird, I have the TaQuilla add on, which is a bit better integrated. It tags mail as it comes in. Again, using Bayesian statistics.
Both work and once the tagging effectiveness is in the high 90% accuracy, I add filtering so that I don't have to read most of my mail. The computer does it for me.
Deleted
I use Gmail and gladly or sadly, depending on how you look at it, priority inbox and the built-in spam filter do an amazingly good job at keeping my inbox tidy. Sadly that encourages laziness, meaning I didn't really read my "normal" email for a while and just skimmed through the subject lines and let them rot in the inbox until a 4-digit number has piled up. Noticing that this isn't a very productive approach I took the time (several hours) to actually go through my inbox and file those emails into the respective folder, delete them, reply to them or unsubscribe from the ever growing amount of lists. After finishing this, I try to do this regularly (daily) to keep things under control and my inbox usable - and as painful as this process was, it helped a lot!
If your inbox were your house, it would be standing room only.
The only time I look at mine any more (the only reason I *have* one, in fact) is when signing up on brain-dead sites that think it's a valid authentication mechanism. Everything else gets deleted without reading.
Now he sees that filtering isn't actually as great as some make it out to be. Spam is still being sent to him, still being processed, still being stored - and he has to pay for all of that. Meanwhile he'll eventually find email trapped in his filter that he wanted, and email that he doesn't want that makes it through.
This is the result of using reactionary methods in response to the spamming epidemic; the spammers will always find ways to get around the filter, or to obfuscate enough to make the filters cause more damage. People are starting to come around to the fact that the spam problem will never be solved by filters.
Spamming is an economic problem, and until we employ economic solutions, spamming will never truly be defeated.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
After seeing this I went through my gmail spam folder: no false positives AFAICS, but I found this little gem:
'UNITED NATIONS COMPENSATION TO VICTIMS OF SCAM'
It's what you might expect, including bad grammer and ridiculous claims, but I found the sheer cheek of the idea quite funny.
We fetch your mail, we route your packets, we guard you while you surf. Don't fuck with us.
Don't be an utter asshole and assume
...that we're talking about work-related email.
The article is some guy who went out and signed up for a shitload of mailing lists and newsletters, and is bitching because he let it get to a critical point before doing something about it.
I got myself to that point once. Guess what I did? I setup some rules in my mail client, created a new account for my "real" emails, and haven't had to deal with it even once since 1998.
Work is a completely different beast. IF you have the ability to control your work email, then similar techniques will work; segregate your email addresses and use client filtering to sort them. If not, then that just sucks. Count yourself lucky, at work I average 1,500 emails per day, most of them ARE relevant to me and I have almost no control over how to sort my mail, limited storage and rule space, etc. Oh, an many of them contain multilple documents attached to them which I also have to look at. My advice in such a situation? Buy a book that teaches people how to "speed-read", and get good at using advanced searching features.
Sounds like you're a shitty manager if you're getting that much junk and can't keep it organized. If you can't even manage a mailbox I feel sorry for the poor bastards who work under you.
So someone kept up with their email and then wrote an article about it? Color me impressed.
giggity
All I do is whitelist who I want to receive email from. If you're not on my list, into the spam bucket you go for 7 days. It's really THAT easy. Yeah, it took a bit to setup, and I still get an occasional client who isn't on my list who complains I don't respond to email, but it's not that difficult to explain and rectify.
Really, would you just allow ANYONE to walk into your home and start talking to you? Of course not. Why accept it in email?
A thousand times, yes.
I have a nearly identical solution, but I configure each address manually as I need it. Each one filters down into a handful of "main" addresses, which in turn hit Gmail. Worked brilliantly for years. Spam? Redirect it to /dev/null, and they never know you've forgotten them. My last newaliases command showed 744 aliases.
Texas Roadhouse raffling a Harley? TexasRoadhouse@. Got a new dentist? DrSmith@.
Now that I (finally) have a droid, I create it on the spot if necessary. In the past I'd send myself a text to email and create it once I get home, which I still do if I'm writing on a form. By the time the nonexistent address graduates to "data entry," I've created it.
---
If someone would FOR THE LOVE OF GOD port TouchTerm from iOS, I'd create each address on the spot. My iTouch is so much smoother, provided there's wifi. Does anyone else need something better than ConnectBot?
Did I say I can't keep it organized?
You're the one who posted "Stupid" to what is a fairly standard (if not particularly brilliant) trope about information overload-- a sort of take off on Merlin Mann's intro to the "Inbox Zero" talk. You got the level in return.
Mann's point, like the above, is very simple-- hey, when all this stuff started, it was cool to get an email from someone sitting in another corporation or across the world. Until, of course, the entire world could send you email.
"Inbox Zero" is certainly one way of dealing or "managing" with that-- if a particularly spastic, attention deprived sort of one. It's primarily flaw is that since it is superficial-- you're trying to dispose of email as quickly as possible-- it tends to be myopic and miss critical details.
Our friends at FaceBook and Berkmann have shown us that human networks normally max out at 200 people or so-- the human mind really can't keep up with more contacts than that, naturally, without assistance.
The question becomes, what if you HAVE TO? The classic example is Vannevar Bush, who coined "information overload," after all, when he headed the US's scientific operations in WWII-- in brief, he just had an enormous amount and breadth of research coming at him. If you look at those as "contacts," and a human can manage 200 without assistance-- maybe Bush had 20,000 or 30,000 to follow.
How? Email is a really crappy tool for doing so. When Bhushan & Co. sent the first packets around the world and wrote the mail protocols, they weren't really thinking about email in terms of information overload and management problems. They were thinking, "isn't it really amazing that we can communicate instantly with these guys in Russia?"
In reality, Crackberry, Twitter and FaceBook addicts aside, if you personally don't have an inbox overload problem, I suspect it is not because you're a "good manager" (or whatever the heck you are), but because you've limited your contacts and avoided the central problem of information overload-- that is, continueing access to "too much information" and the need to develop new tools to manage, understand and direct the flow. You've adopted the head-in-the-sand approach, which is common enough.
he didn't say he couldn't keep it organized, he's just saying that 400 messages does not always indicate stupidity.
If you're ever after a temporary email address that you're never going to need again:
www.10minutemail.com
It will change your life forever :)
Do these things, spam dies...
A huge notable ISP or government would have to start this... someplace everyone wants to send mail through or to... Gmail would be perfect.
- Enable TLS on your inbound mail server. Start immediately tracking mail servers that fall into these categories: ... Use TLS properly and identify themselves with properly signed keys from a third-party source. ... Use TLS for encryption using self-signed keys. ... Don't use TLS.
- Immediately filter out servers that are dumb enough to use TLS as spam senders. (The really dumb one's.)
- Notify all senders that after X date, ONLY TLS enabled servers will be able to communicate with your domain or through it.
- Notify all senders that after Y date, ONLY TLS enabled servers with properly signed keys will be able to communicate.
Yup, it means a metric ton of CPU upgrades or TLS front-ends need to be put in front of large mail farms.
But if you can identify every server that talks to yours and/or block the servers and or keys that are known to have been compromised, spam drops to an annoyance. SpamAssassin and other services are far less likely to even be needed but can still backstop the process, and all sorts of good things happen.
Why mail server authentication and encryption haven't taken off yet on a massive scale, is only a matter of willpower by one huge entity willing to make the sacrifice of "guess we won't get mail from servers that can't identify themselves properly with PKI". Once it's in place, you just block servers you don't ever want mail from and you have traceable IDs for all the rest.
It's possible. No one has the cojones to do it at a place like Google or Amazon or some large branch of government. Make TLS mandatory to e-mail information about government bids to their procurement people, every large company in the U.S. with government contracts would cost-justify it overnight and deploy it.
Why should mail servers still be running SMTP unauthenticated and unencrypted in 2011? Browsers have been doing SSL for how long?
+++OK ATH
"He read every email he received and dealt with them all, either by replying, filing, or unsubscribing. He even scanned his spam filter for false positives. It was a lot harder than he thought it would be."
I've been doing this just about every day, ever since I've had an email address. What's the big deal? A good spam filter helps, of course, and so does being organized, but it's not impossible by a long shot.
Spammers were going through a phase of sending from captured addresses as well as sending to them.
They still do that. It happened to me on Wednesday. Five spam messages of the "I just found this, it's so cool, click on this link to see it" variety, all with the same timestamp, sent to everybody in my address book while I was logged out of the email account and my PC was shut down.
Every time I read an article from IT-World that has been posted to Slashdot, I am overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity of the articles. Anyone who works at IT-World talks about using their computer as if it were some kind of advanced typewriter. Have these people ever used a real computer in their life?
The worst article I have ever seen there was some guy who went on and on about how he hates Microsoft Word's new features and wished he had a nicer editor... Yeah.. sure... and I guess there are only two operating systems in the whole world, Windows and Mac, and there are only four editors in the whole world: Word, Notepad, and WordPad, and Mac OS TextEdit.
Now this moron who wrote the TFA claims to route six or seven e-mail addresses all to G-Mali, and relies entirely on search to retrieve information from it? Now he thinks it might be some kind of fun or interesting challenge to actually read everything for once? He doesn't use a non-web based e-mail client with better indexing features? He doesn't use filtering? He doesn't create separate folders for mailing lists and social-networking notifications? What the FUCK is wrong with this guy?