Well, anyone who knows me already knows that I belong in the latter group. I have three personal e-mail addresses. All three are free, web-based providers. Hotmail was my first e-mail address, and I will always keep it because it's the address that people who've known me for a long time know best. I got an AOL address long ago because a zillion years ago, when I first got Internet service, I got it through AOL. I no longer get my service through AOL, but since it's free, I've kept the e-mail address. That's the address I use for subscriptions to the above-mentioned self-induced junk mail. You know, Groupon, livingsocial, stores of all kinds—anyone who insists on getting my e-mail address when all I want is to win an iPad. It's also the one that various organizations have somehow discovered—apparently by scanning the subjects of my incoming and outgoing e-mails—and use to send me their product information, ideological ideas, religious beliefs, and other variously interesting downright perplexing e-mails. Some of these represent things that I do not even remotely support, so it's a mystery to me how they came to know me, but I have learned from past experience that it is absolutely futile, indeed perhaps even dangerous, to try to unsubscribe from these organizations. Unsubscribing seems, if anything, to unleash a barrage of new correspondence from these places, so I just ignore the mail and even delete it (yes! delete!) occasionally. Then I have my Gmail account, which I now think of as my “personal personal” account, as even my Hotmail account has been somewhat invaded by stores and sites that I do business with online. I get almost no personal e-mail on AOL, about 50 percent on Hotmail, and almost 100 percent on Gmail. So, there is a pecking order to my e-mail accounts (though, being OCD, I do check all three every day. Okay, several times every day.)
I am inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, so I just leave all of those unopened Groupon and eBay notices in my inbox, where a bold-faced number next to my inbox indicates how many of them there are. This is usually a very high number, but there are very few consequences to keeping all of those e-mails.
In fact, as far as I can see, there is only one unpleasant consequence to keeping every e-mail I've ever received, and it is this: when I need to find a specific e-mail, say a purchase confirmation or an airline ticket or something like that, I have to scroll through thousands of e-mails to find the one I need. This is hardest in AOL, which doesn't have a search feature, and which is where almost all of my purchase-related e-mails reside. So, on a day like today, when I go in search of the Groupon that I bought for my aunt and me to take an art class, but I can't remember when I bought it, and—more importantly—when it expires. Oh, and it may not have been from Groupon. Maybe it was from livingsocial. Or Half Off Depot. So, you get the idea here. This search could take awhile.
It is during these searches that I get the idea of deleting some of these old, unopened e-mails, just for chuckles. I then spend about the next 56 hours laboriously going through, identifying as junk, and deleting only those e-mails which are clearly useless to me. In AOL, this process is made far more tedious by certain limitations of the service that I won't go into here. Suffice it to say that what starts out as a quick, “oh, I need to find this one e-mail” turns into an obsessive-compulsive slog through thousands of e-mails.
Which gets me to the statistic that I started to post on Facebook this morning, but which I felt was meaningless without all of that prior explanation. I started out with 5,449 unopened e-mails in my AOL inbox. After about two-and-a-half hours, I had whittled it down to 3,056 and had made it all the way through the K's (I had arranged the e-mails alphabetically by sender name).
I figure that if I put about another three hours into it, I can dispense with all of the junk e-mail in my AOL inbox. Then, I vow (as I always do) that I will start deleting these e-mails each day as they come in, rather than letting them build up for about 16 months as I did “last time.” But I will not. Now, you realize that I am talking about only those e-mails that were unopened and had already been deemed, in some part of my brain, as junk. But some of them were the kind of junk that falls into the “that's something I need to keep forever but that does not require opening right now—or ever” category, whereas others fall into the categories of “I might go back and look at that one later,” or “That's just junk.” I do not even deal with the e-mails from the last 14 years that I have previously opened, since opening it signals to me that it is important or personal, and therefore, needs to be kept forever..
Anyway, after I finish in AOL, I can get started on the 8,963 unopened e-mails that are in my Hotmail inbox. And, no—in case you're wondering—that is not a made-up number for the purpose of hyperbole. At least clearing out the Hotmail inbox will make seemingly short work of dispatching the 1,246 e-mails in my Gmail inbox.
If you want to comment on this post, just e-mail me. I'll read it. I promise.
