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.
Great idea. Spring cleaning always makes you feel better. I use an old yahoo email address for all those subscriptions, so all of the informative newsletters etc that I want to read… unfortunately rarely get read as I never have time to open up that old yahoo email account. Oh well.
If you use Outlook you can always have filters setup to move messages into folders based on the sender or recipient address.