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."

Comments

If this was an email...

[neonmonk]

If this was an email, I'd instinctively delete it.

Multiple accounts....

[Immostlyharmless]

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.

Stupid

[geek]

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.

Re:I must be lucky

[phantomfive]

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.

Your own domain

[coldmist]

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.

Re:Your own domain

[stephanruby]

Spamgourmet allows you to do this on-the-fly, no personalized domain necessary.

Let's say your free email address at spamgourmet is joe@spamgourmet.com

Wen registering at Newegg, you'd just write newegg.joe@spamgourmet.com and spamgourmet would automatically forward your email to your real email address. The system even allows you to reply to the forwarded message from your real email address, and spamgourmet will act as the intermediary removing your original email address from the message. Spamgourmet even has more capabilities than that, for instance you could just write newegg.12.joe@spamgourmet.com instead that would mean you're only expecting 12 emails from Newegg, not a single more and spamgourmet would just keep a reverse counter (and of course, the system allows you to change your mind, for instance you could just decide to whitelist any of the emails coming from Newegg even if you had it set to only receive 12 emails from them).

And of course, some web sites have been banning spamgourmet email address from their registration form, but that doesn't really matter, spamgourmet has many alternative domains you can use, and you can even donate your own domain to the cause if you wanted.

And by the way, the system is free and open source, so you could even set this system up on your own servers if you wanted (not that you'd really need to).

Re:Gmail is your problem

[Aequitarum Custos]

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.

Re:I don't remember those 90s...

[Miamicanes]

I do the same thing with hyphens and Qmail. It's practically eliminated spam as a problem for nearly a decade. The only two problems I have are people (and businesses) that get freaked out seeing an email address like me-yourname@mydomain.com, and websites that want an email address to recover a login (if I can't figure out what address I made up for that particular site... I have semi-standards, but they don't always work 100%).

Re:I don't remember those 90s...

[hairyfeet]

Actually I KNOW it is much better and I'll explain why...webmail. remember when we all ran our own email programs and had to download all the shit on a sucktastic dialup modem? Sure the spam wasn't as bloaty then but the line was a HELL of a lot slower.

So yes these kids these days don't know how good they got it. They got webmail, they have never been hit by the evil that was Comet Cursors (having your cursor turn into a pocketwatch and slam the CPU so hard your OCed Celeron 300A ran like a 286 trying to load Win98? Fun) or being blinded at 3AM because you tripped over a link and it was a Geocities page in "OMG Ponies!" with bright ass lime green text on a puke pink background with glitter shit falling like rain, or going into work and finding half the boxes have been Bonzi Buddy'ed and your coworkers are screaming at you "OMFG KILL THAT DAMNED MONKEY!"

Yeah kids today they got it so easy, with their multicore this, 3D that. Now get off my lawn!

Re:I don't remember those 90s...

[hairyfeet]

Ya know that is the one kind of "spam" I have to say I really enjoy. Opening my inbox and finding something I wanted ultra cheap, like that 1Tb Samsung I got for $35? that's nice. Or the "77 features of Windows 7" which actually pointed out a few tricks I'd never heard of (type PSR in the start search and you can record what you are doing as a step by step tutorial, real handy when i'm teaching someone how to use a complex program) which showed up last week? That's nice.

But to me the sweetest thing about email today is how damned nice the spam filters have gotten. i remember when false positives were high and you'd still get a bunch of "4er8al v1agra" bullshit, but now? I can't remember the last time I saw spam in my Yahoo or my Gmail.

So while I can understand why some my want to unsubscribe I like getting my parts cheap too much or learning cool tricks to give up my newsletters. As long as the webmail guys (thanks webmail guys) keep the spam filters rocking finding a couple of sales flyers and a newsletter or two is just a nice diversion.