Ever consider just abandoning your email altogether?

[Ginevra]

Or maybe not quite that. But almost. I get so much email I am becoming increasingly disinclined to even look at it each day. I star the stuff that isimportant, but in three days, it is long buried and there’s is no likelihood I will see it again until six months later when I am deleting hundreds of emails. 

I have dozens of sub-folders and, when I am diligent, I am good about moving things where they belong, but then I get disenchanted again and end up with six hundred unreads. I do also go on un-sub sprees, but sometimes I do apparently get on a list with nine thousand affiliates - currently, I keep getting asked if I want to drive for Lyft or Uber. And I keep getting insurance companies, presumably from when I was looking into replacing our preposterous health insurance before Jan 1st. 

There are some things I am subscribed to and, in theory, I do want those emails - The Skimm, The Daily Good, Be More With Less - but I read about 10-20% of them in reality. I just cannot keep up. 

Tempted to just never look at it again...

[Garga]

I’m in the same boat.  I have hundreds of unread emails, things get buried, I subscribe to things and don’t have time to read them, I unsubscribe and it seems like I still have the same amount coming in.

It’s a monster.  Every break from school, I plan on clearing everything out.  It rarely happens that way, though.

[ScoutTN]

No, but I keep my spam filters tight, don't suscribe to lists and just don't get so much that I can't sort through it in a short time each day. 

 

[Innisfree]

I loathe email. Loathe it.

It can be useful, yes, but the junk so vastly outweighs the important stuff that I tend to think nothing of any importance will be there, then miss the one thing I needed to see. And I do try to unsubscribe to stuff, but there's always more.

[Guest]

Just now, ScoutTN said:

No, but I keep my spam filters tight, don't suscribe to lists and just don't get so much that I can't sort through it in a short time each day. 

 

I don’t know why that isn’t me. 

There are numerous things I have to at least glance at - homeschool co-op son’s baseball, other son’s LAX, other son’s school and the college he will attend in fall. Add in in-laws and my family members. I’m also on a neighborhhod thing, which is handy because I live on a secluded lot and not a true neighborhood. It’s good to look and I sometimes post but I get multiple emails on that daily. 

[Garga]

1 minute ago, Innisfree said:

I loathe email. Loathe it.

It can be useful, yes, but the junk so vastly outweighs the important stuff that I tend to think nothing of any importance will be there, then miss the one thing I needed to see. And I do try to unsubscribe to stuff, but there's always more.

Yes!  I pay for my son’s online Algebra class each month.  They send an invoice each month that I look for, but somehow I missed it.  Sometimes I walk away from my computer for only 2 hours and come back to 50 new emails.  

[Hyacinth]

I have several email accounts. One for my freelance work, one for personal, and one for those "subscribe to get a coupon code" or other such correspondence. I'm ruthless about unsubscribing, too. Would that help or would it make you feel more inundated?

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Hyacinth said:

I have several email accounts. One for my freelance work, one for personal, and one for those "subscribe to get a coupon code" or other such correspondence. I'm ruthless about unsubscribing, too. Would that help or would it make you feel more inundated?

I did actually make one like that one year before doing Christmas shopping so all of those once-I-bought-from-you emails would go to the DanielleDeals email or whatever I called it, but then I just abandoned it because I didn’t want to keep logging out and in. I think that makes it worse.

I do also manage emails for DH’s businesses, but usually only access that from one computer that I use just for business. 

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, Kinsa said:

Huh. I hardly ever get emails. Interesting.

That’s fascinating to me. How??? 

My DH gets very few, but he is not the home manager type person here. He also hardly buys anything. That would be me. He doesn’t manage to even get on the sports emails most seasons, so it ends up with me forwarding the game schedules or important stuff like, “Game has been moved to Cedar Lane today at 5:00!!!”

[Innisfree]

My feelings on email were probably permanently warped by one of dd's preschool teachers. She was probably great with the kids (she actually taught another class, not dd's). But she was an older teacher who seemed like a dragon to me.

At that time, we had only recently actually gotten a home computer and thus email. I guess we'd had them for maybe two or three years, but the computer was only there for amusement, and we literally had no one who communicated with us via email. Our jobs had never made use of it; it was just this sort of superfluous form of communication hanging out there. Only junk came in. I was in my thirties, mind, and dh in his forties. Email had not been a part of our lives.

So then dd went to preschool, and they sent some important notification by email. And when the teacher confronted me I stammered out something about never checking email. And she glared at me and repeated "You never check email?"

 i mean, yes, I'd given them the email address, but then I'd also given them our street address. I didn't really expect them to turn up at either! It was very traumatic, lol. I think it clouded email with shame for me forever.  If I could, I'd just avoid it.

 

[SKL]

No, but I do block and unsubscribe as often as I get a chance.  In my work email, I can get over a hundred junk mails a day, despite fairly vigilant blocking.  But it's worse if I don't keep up with the blocking.  So I do it.  Think of it like basic hygiene and body functions - you just do it kuz you have to.  You get into a habit that works and don't waste too much brain power on it.

My problem is that I don't use my free time wisely and clear my minor to-dos.  For example, filing the email attachments on my hard drive.  So that I don't forget all together, I leave it in my inbox until I get around to it.  But I have way too much backlog and it does weigh me down.

In my personal email, I have a few categories in my inbox:  upcoming activities I don't want to forget, charity documentation I need to compile for tax reasons, and important deadlines that I can't afford to leave buried in my work email box.  Sometimes I get it down to a pretty low number.

I get a lot less junk mail in my personal email, for unknown reasons.

[Janeway]

I keep having to remove myself from mailing lists. I do have a different email account for school related things. I am starting to wonder if I should actually be using it for school related things. I have everything forwarded from everyone's email accounts to mine so I can keep an eye on anything the kids get, or things my husband gets that I need to take care of and he will forget to tell me, like utility bills or important requests from health insurance! (ha ha..won't have a repeat of those situations)

[sweet2ndchance]

I also have several email accounts but I use an email software that allows me to check all of them in one place. I can filter the emails by email address so that I don't even have to look at all the emails from the "subscribe to my emails to get your freebie" type of emails if I don't want to.

I use Mailbird which I paid for the lifetime membership a long time ago. But something like Thunderbird or even Outlook would work too.

[scholastica]

I have currently 69,504 unread emails. My dd is horrified. Most of them are discounts and coupons. I don't read them until I need them.  I do unsubscribe at times. I feel no compunction to do anything with them. If Google is willing to store them in perpetuity for free, why should I waste my time moving them around and deleting? I just search for the sender when I need something. I check it several times a day. I've never missed anything important.

[catz]

I get hundreds of e-mails every day.  My son is getting college e-mails right now and I'm getting those too - that's making it worse!  Beware if you check yes on colleges contacting you via the ACT or SAT.  It's relentless.  

I have had streaks of unsubscribe and spam set up but I haven't done that for a while.  I'm due.  

But no, I cannot abandon e-mail all together.  I mostly run my life online.  If I had to go back to making phone calls and contacting people personally, I'm pretty sure I'd lose it.  No thank you!

[Lecka]

I aggressively unsubscribed recently, and it has made a huge difference.  

[Guest]

1 hour ago, scholastica said:

I have currently 69,504 unread emails. My dd is horrified. Most of them are discounts and coupons. I don't read them until I need them.  I do unsubscribe at times. I feel no compunction to do anything with them. If Google is willing to store them in perpetuity for free, why should I waste my time moving them around and deleting? I just search for the sender when I need something. I check it several times a day. I've never missed anything important.

When I have a lot of unreads, it’s hard for me to notice something I should pay attention to. It just jumbles together. I also hate that it refers to me as “Me” in a group email chain. I wish it just said “Danielle.” It would be easier to notice my name than “me”. I hate that stupid “me”. 

[scholastica]

8 minutes ago, Quill said:

When I have a lot of unreads, it’s hard for me to notice something I should pay attention to. It just jumbles together. I also hate that it refers to me as “Me” in a group email chain. I wish it just said “Danielle.” It would be easier to notice my name than “me”. I hate that stupid “me”. 

I can see that. I only get a few important emails, so I check emails from the important people and ignore the rest. With all the unreads, my actual important emails stand out. You’re probably getting a lot more important stuff coming through. I don’t have very many important things happening.

[frogger]

I don't subscribe to things or purchase things through my main email. I have an old hotmail account from way back and I just give companies that address. People I actually care about get my daily read address. The other one doesn't get read but I can go search for something if I need too. Except my dear Aunt. I care about her but have never given her an updated email address because she still forwards 10-20 maybe 30 things a day. Everyone else in the world realized that was a bad idea decades ago. She tends to use a phone for real communication.

[Murphy101]

3 hours ago, Quill said:

I don’t know why that isn’t me. 

There are numerous things I have to at least glance at - homeschool co-op son’s baseball, other son’s LAX, other son’s school and the college he will attend in fall. Add in in-laws and my family members. I’m also on a neighborhhod thing, which is handy because I live on a secluded lot and not a true neighborhood. It’s good to look and I sometimes post but I get multiple emails on that daily. 

 

Subscriptions to stuff can usually have the settings changed to weekly instead of daily.  Or you can even set it to no emails and only check it directly when you want to for whatever reason. 

I’m very persnickety about my cell number and my email. I rarely give out either and am very quick to block anyone that spams me. 

I have two emails. One for important stuff that I never want to risk missing. And the other one for everything else. 

The important one, I check once a day, maybe twice. The other one, maybe once a week or so.

I’ve abandoned a couple emails over the years that apparently became fishing fodder. I just deleted those accounts entirely. 

The great thing about abandoning/deleting an email, is you quickly realize how much you don’t care about getting. I mean if it takes you four months to even notice that you don’t get some email - how important could it have possibly been to you?

[regentrude]

I have several email accounts. I get dozens of emails each day on my work email that I must read and handle. I have a personal account for personal communications, and I have a junk account that I use for online purchases and stuff like that. It gets a fair bit of span and I don't look at it often.

[Tanaqui]

Get one or two new emails for personal/business communication only. Abandon the old one to spam. Every time you have to sign up for something, use the spam email.

[sbgrace]

I abandoned (sort of/I still have it) an old email that just became over-run with too much.

I have been careful not to hand out the new email (actually, its probably 5 years old now) to anyone outside of important people and things. 

[Liz CA]

I do a couple of things:

1. Regular family email has spam filters set fairly rigorously. Anything spammish that falls through gets deleted immediately. My filter works by monitoring what I repeatedly delete to identify unwanted emails.

2. For work related stuff I have a separate email that is only used for sending / receiving work reports but I have used it around birthdays / Christmas to order something so nobody else could see the order confirmation.

3. And I have a third email  only used for dubious sites when I am not sure if the site is legit but I am researching or looking for info and want to see the content. This email rarely gets checked but after 500 unread emails or so, they delete automatically.

[Ottakee]

Nope.  I do way too much business by email.  Today I changed my ROTH IRA contribution by email, contacted the monument place for MIL headstone and got a proof sent via email which I could then have another family member proof read.  I get a lot of notifications about my job (substitute teacher) via email, etc.

I do try to unsubscribe to lots of stuff and use my spam filter.  Then once a week I go through my emails and delete as much as I can.

 

[stephanier.1765]

Nope for me too. I probably have 2-5 in my inbox and another 2-5 in my promotional box (mostly from Amazon) each morning. I read and file the inbox e-mails and scan and mostly delete the promotional ones. Then, I'll read and delete whatever is left. I might get a couple more e-mail throughout the day but I might get zero as well.

I have unsubscribed, blocked and set my spam filter pretty tight. Plus my gmail is good about spotting spam on its own. Almost too good sometimes.

[LucyStoner]

I like the bundling feature in Gmail now.  

But the truth is, I HAVE pretty much-abandoned email as a method of communication.  I look at my personal email about 1x a week or if I am looking for something from the school or a doctor.  The rest is receipts for purchases, marketing (political, charitable and places I shop) and such.  My friends and I don't email each other.  We text. 

I maintain a separate email for my self-employment.  I check that daily, but those people pay my invoices so they get a response when they need a response.  

[Lanny]

If you didn't have email and you tried to order something online, you would not receive the order confirmation, tracking, etc. That's just one tiny example.  I can see not having Facebook, but more than once, my wife has suggested that I contact some company about an issue and that did the trick.  I have tightened up my settings on Facebook and usually spend 2 or 3 minutes a day there, and that's how I keep up with a bunch of friends and relatives and businesses. Don't give up the ship with regard to your email account.  Or, maybe start a new email account and try to limit who knows about it.

[Guest]

33 minutes ago, Lanny said:

If you didn't have email and you tried to order something online, you would not receive the order confirmation, tracking, etc. That's just one tiny example.  I can see not having Facebook, but more than once, my wife has suggested that I contact some company about an issue and that did the trick.  I have tightened up my settings on Facebook and usually spend 2 or 3 minutes a day there, and that's how I keep up with a bunch of friends and relatives and businesses. Don't give up the ship with regard to your email account.  Or, maybe start a new email account and try to limit who knows about it.

I am strongly considering your last line. I might just give my old email over to the vultures and use a new email only for school, co-op, sports and friends/family. Check the old one once per week, or if I order something. I will keep the old one for online order confirmations. 

I have one friend who somehow rigged it so that all the incoming emails she received went directly to trash. In this way, she would just remove the few that were NOT actually trash and leave everything else in the trash. 

[Lady Florida.]

If I was still working I could see a need for an email account. Then again, if I was still working I'd probably have an employer email account like dh does. There are still a few things I use it for, the main one being contact with older relatives (consider that I'm 62 when you read "older relatives" lol). I have a few aunts whose only attempt at 21st century communication is email. FIL (93!) is on facebook but he uses email to send one message to all the adult children and grandchildren to keep us all up to date. 

I get some emails from companies that I actually signed up for like coupons and deals but even those end up being too much after a while. Still, there are some deals I don't want to miss and I'd rather they clog up my email than my texting app. I periodically go in and try to delete old spam and even junk I signed up for but after a very short time I get tired of it because there are just so many messages that I feel like I'll be there for hours. 

I don't think email is going away from the business world anytime soon but personal email seems to already be a thing of the past. My friends and I either text or use Messenger. We're too old to bother with Instagram or Tumblr (is that even still used?). I occasionally use Twitter but only to see what's trending. I rarely tweet except to vent or to retweet something political.

[Wheres Toto]

I still have the AOL email I signed up for in the 90's.   It's my general use personal account with a kind of silly name.  It's what I use for most subscriptions and filling out forms.

Then I have a gmail account that is my full name for more professional use, like when I sent out resumes for jobs or everything for my freelance assignments.

Then I have an email for my business, which is the business name @gmail.

Then I have an email for my 4-H club, which is the club name@gmail.

I theoretically have an email for my old company, that I freelance for occasionally but I can't actually access the mail.  I only use it to sign in to do timesheets each week.

I keep my inboxes cleaned up for all of these.  I hate seeing that little number symbol on the icons on my phone . Spam is pretty cleaned up too.  Gmail is much better for that than yahoo accounts I've had in the past.

I need email because I absolutely detest talking on the phone, but I do also text quite a bit and I am on Facebook.

ETA:  I go through and delete things from my phone every day, which keeps it under control but I also don't get that much.  Maybe 20 or so a day.  I like gmail MUCH better than AOL for multiple email accounts because I can be logged onto all of them at the same time and just switch accounts.  AOL I used to have to sign out of one and sign into the other, and that was annoying.