Leashing Email, part 3

This morning at when I checked email for the first time today at 9am, I was eagerly looking forward to seeing less. Less spam, because I using Cloudmark, Less vendor-spam because I fired a dozen or so yesterday, less news-spam because I fired the lot yesterday.

Poor fool me!

Instead, of 84 emails, 4 were actual communications from people I know. Eighty emails were:

• 26 please confirm you emailed us responses from all over the world to spam emails that are spoofing my email address as the sender. (See email is broken.)
• 29 spam Cloudmark filtered - and 4 I got to be the first guinea pig for. That's not bad and I can live with the idea that by "paying" with my judgment Cloudmark should block those 4 spam (the nasty image + contemporary text spam) I get 29 sent to spam automatically.
• 13 self inflicted productivity wounds. These are "email newsletters" (an oxymoron) and ads from people I've done business with online. Fired the lot of them.
• 8 news spam. Wait a minute! Didn't I fire all those yesterday? Should I call the FTC and get them to enforce the CAN-SPAMM federal statutes? Nope - it's just mainstream media trickery - While I fired the daily emails yesterday, I have to go back in and fire all of the "email alerts" (Congress is now in session with the Dems in charge - wow, hot news!).

Amazing how easy it was to subscribe to this email pap and how hard it is to unsubscribe! So, a half hour later after un-inflicting my email wounds and unsubscribing to email new alerts about things I don't care about, and adding a few more items to my News folder in my RSS Reader, I can only hope that tomorrow will be a better email day.

Comments

[Bob Walsh]

Great suggestion Scot! To me, the destruction of email as a useful means of communication will go down in the history books as a major battle lost in the war against the "commercialize everything" movement.

[Scot Herrick]

Delightful, Bob. Not to you, of course, but the posts!

It took us how long to screw up our e-mail practice with bad things? I don't think you can expect to clean up all the bad practices in one day.

When you get to "clean," I'd suggest doing a summary post of all the things that you did to get to that point with how long it took to do each step. It may take a couple of weeks before you can write it!

Scot