I’ve been using my current personal Yahoo email address for about three years now. Through that time, I have managed to have my email added to various mailing lists – some by choice, others not. Between these various email lists, Facebook alerts and forwarded chain mails, it was starting to get to the point where important emails or messages that deemed worthy of followup were often forgotten as fresh emails piled up over the older ones.

On top of this, I also have the bad habit of not deleting messages – whether it is an email from a friend asking a simple question or stating a comment, to a Facebook alert. About a month ago, I reduced my inbox from a triple digit number of unread emails to just under 20. In just over a week’s time, I was back up to 116 by today.

I’m back down now to 16 as we speak, many of which are week old forwarded sent to me by my dad. While he claims to only forward me the “best of the best,” I somehow wind up with three or four from him throughout the week. I think it somehow hurts his feelings when I repeatedly tell him that I haven’t read them yet. I feel bad enough to that I have 12 or 13 of them unopened in my inbox, just waiting for me to look through them when the time is right. The furthest one back dates to January 21st of this year.

I finally had enough though with the unnecessary emails from various news alerts, advertisements and recaps. Just because I buy a particular product one time does not mean I want to receive every single news item related to it for the rest of my life.  Today, I went through my inbox and whenever I got to a subsription email that I did not care to receive anymore, I unsubscribed. Some of these includes updates and alerts from Cubs.com, the NHL, the Coast to Coast AM overnight radio show, eMarketer Daily, the Campaign for Liberty, Lids & Hat World, LinkedIn (thanks to my stupid college that emails updates through it a few times a week), Barnes & Noble, the WGN/Chicago radio station, Weight Circles, the Better Government Association, Ask the Builder (a poor attempt to get more into D-I-Y stuff related to my job), and GradSchools.com among others.

I learned a long time ago that when you unsubscribe from a mailing list, it could be a trick that simply alerts the sender that your email is active, prompting them to continue sending you stuff, while selling your email address because they now know it is active. My particular subscriptions, I don’t believe were with sleazeball associations, so I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will be removed from most of these lists. I also have turned off all Facebook alerts.

I’m taking my inbox back! Not too exciting, but I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of changing email addresses (those who know me long enough know that I had my fun with different emails back in the day). I like using my Yahoo account and I don’t have much of a desire to change it. After all, every creative person knows that the hardest part about changing email addresses is coming up with something that is well suitable, and also not already taken by some other mope.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Computers, Gadgets and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.