Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
I can't comment on other people, but the guy in the article is someone who has subscribed to over 50 newsletters that he doesn't want to read. In the article he complains about his poor personal management skills, insults people who don't agree with him politically, insults people who do agree with him politically, and complains.
What he doesn't do is explain why a common email management scheme is hell.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What bothered me was the disagreement of tense: "He read every email he received and deal with them all" ... it gives me chills even on a re-read.
I'm not a bird, I'm a super-advanced flying stealth dinosaur!
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.
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.
Gmail has given me the LEAST spam of the 3 big name providers (Google/Yahoo/Microsoft), including when I had my own e-mail server with spamassassin. Not sure what problems you have with Gmail, but false positive rate is minimal and I rarely get more than 50 -actual- spam messages a month. Rest is notifications/newsletters I actually signed up for, or work related.
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
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.
Exactly what I thought after having read the first page, didn't bother clicking through to the second. That guy is using GMail, he should just start to familiarize himself with its features and he'd have a lot less stuff to read. Auto-mark-as-read-and-tag for messages coming from Facebook and Twitter, anything containing the word "Newsletter" or "Press Release", that sounds like the solution to his problem. If he's filtering manually he's doing it wrong.