On any given day I receive over 400 emails between my four different email accounts. One account I never check, so we can ignore the truly unsolicited emails over there. The other 350 have been to some extent or another requested – store mailing lists, list-serves, group emails, etc, etc, etc.
For the longest time I’ve just dealt with doing a mass delete every week, making my email show me everything that’s unread and going click-happy with the delete key. That was fine as long as the email only cluttered my email in box, but since I got a BlackBerry last year, it’s also cluttered my phone, causing it to vibrate every few minutes when a new email comes in.
I’m tired of reacting to my phone only to discover that yet another Pottery Barn email has come in. I’m tired of spending hours deleting emails I have no interest in opening. So I’m doing something about it.
I kicked off Operation Unsubscribe at the end of last week and I’ve been steadily working my way back through my email, unsubscribing to everything I wouldn’t regularly open.
I’ve discovered
– that I’ve been subscribed to some newsletters for well over 8 years.
– I never read those newsletters.
– Some are quite interesting and I probably should read them.
– I signed up for some newsletters two careers ago.
– Oddly enough the marketing ones are once again pertinent.
– I get store newsletters I never signed up for, for stores I’ve never heard of. Not sure how that happened.
– That it can take up to 10 days to be unsubscribed from a list. Why?
– As soon as you unsubscribe they send you a TON of emails. Why again?
– Email newsletter unsubscribe pages were written by Jewish moms. It’s all “No, I NEVER want to receive another email from you.” The guilt factor is high.
Taking control of my inbox is unbelievably empowering. It’s like organization light. I have zero control over the chaos in my house, but my email is going to be sleek and organized any time now. I just know it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just saw an email come in that I have no desire to read and every desire to cancel.
I too have unsubscribed from a lot of e-mail newsletters which I found to have not much added value to my current intrest/ status at the moment. A lot of these emails are basically hyped up marketing or sales flyers of stuff which I will never consider buying. Happy Unsubcribing!!
I went on my very own Operation: Unsubscribe last weekend as a cost cutting measure.
“If I don’t know about the sale at the Gap, I probably won’t spend any more MONEY at the Gap…”
You’re line about the house is spot on! It turns out I was actually avoiding the laundry.
I keep a separate account for store/ sale emails I do want to get and it doesn’t come to my phone. That way I can login and check them out when I’m shopping instead of being tempted.
I laughed at your Jewish mom line. It’s crazy how some of the unsubscribes are worded! And don’t get me started on the email after I unsubscribe!
the constant vibrating of my phone is pretty much what made me take control of my inbox too.
on thing i do for the mailing list emails that are interesting and i probably should read them is set up a gmail filter to auto archive and mark them as read. then they don’t affect my phone but they are still there if i do have some free time in which i’m inspired to read them. i also do that for like order confirmations in bank statement notifications and such – emails i want to keep but don’t want to read especially on my phone.