On April 30 I posted an article Make May Day “Unwanted Email Unsubscribe Day” with tips on clearing your Inbox of unwanted email — not spam, but subscriptions you signed up for, but no longer had an interest in. The article was well received and it received a few comments, too. (Surprisingly I received a lot of email about it).
One great comment came from David Bondelevitch at dB’s Blog, who said:
Not just the inbox; every once in a while I will run a search in my trash for the word UNSUBSCRIBE and click on most of them.
Be careful though, some e-mails use that link to phish, and all you are doing is confirming to them that it is a functional e-mail address.
Today, I am still thinning out the Inbox and unsubscribing to several emails.
I am also updating my subscriptions, too. Some of the email addresses I subscribed with are addresses I’m not interested in using as much as I used to. So in some cases I am going back the original signup web site and updating my subscription details.
Some of the companies I receive mail from have taken this into consideration, and they’ve included a “Update your Preferences” link at the bottom of the email. Some other haven’t prepared for this possibility. In extreme cases, I have had to unsubscribe one address and resubscribe with another.
So keeping the Inbox thin is just like keeping yourself thin. The work never ends, it’s an ongoing process.