Skylarking

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.

I get way too much email. The bulk of my email isn’t even personal messages, but mostly bulk email messages from newsletter subscriptions, web site and online shopping offers, fan site updates, business networking updates, social networking updates, Twitter alerts, Facebook notices, etc.

I’ve been getting so many of these that the personal and direct business emails have been getting lost under it all in my Inbox. On top of that, my mail files has become so large that the file became corrupted, and I wasn’t able to delete some messages.

Usually I spend a little bit of time one or two days a week just going through my mail sorting and deleting. It gets hard to keep up with it all, and I am still missing important messages.

I finally concluded: “the best thing to do is to reduce the amount of email I receive”.

So the first of May is tomorrow. Often referred to as May Day, which reminds me of the distress call “Mayday!”. I have made this the day, starting today, that I sit down with my email, take a good look at these bulk mail messages, and I UNSUBSCRIBE to them.

Here’s what I did:

1. In my Inbox I clicked the top of the column where it says “From”. This sorts all my mail into groups of people and organizations.
2. Then I scroll through the list looking for the biggest groups. These probably send to me every single day of the week.
3. If I don’t want to see their emails again, I open one and scroll down to the bottom to find the UNSUBSCRIBE link. Bulk mailers are supposed to include an unsubscribe link.
4. I click the link, which takes me to their web site where I am clearly offered an option to UNSUBSCRIBE, or they notify me that I will no longer receive their emails. (They have 10 days to comply according to the FTC).
5. After I’ve unsubscribed I close the email message, and then I delete all the other messages in that group.

So save yourself, your Inbox, and your sanity, and make today your Email Unsubscribe Day!

Just over a year ago I reported on the Justice Department’s indictment of 11 “individuals” involved in an identity theft ring that targeted wireless retail networks of TJX Companies, BJ’s Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, and DSW, among others. They were charged for stealing over 130 million credit and debit card numbers.

Albert Gonzalez, hacker

One of those indicted was a U.S. citizen named Albert Gonzalez, age 28. Gonzalez, under arrest on one ID theft case, had been working as an informant in a second case, and was found to be criminally involved in a third identity theft ring. Over the weekend he admitted his guilt in an older case, and agreed to forfeit assets gained by crimes.  Among his assets were a condominium in Miami, a 2006 BMW, various computers and laptops, a Glock 27 firearm, a Nokia cell phone, a Tiffany diamond ring and three Rolex watches.

Gonzalez was scheduled to go to trial Sept. 14 in federal court in Central Islip, N.Y. His charges included operating a fraud scheme from April through September in 2007, and hacking into computers at the corporate headquarters of the Dave & Buster’s restaurant chain where he stole debit and credit card numbers. He faces 15 years to 25 years in prison.

On the second case, Gonzalez faces as many as 35 years in prison.In that case Gonzalez and the other hackers malware and so-called “injection strings” to attack the computers and steal data. They installed “sniffer” programs to capture data “on a real-time basis” as it moved through the computer networks. They used instant messaging services to advise each other on how to navigate the systems. They also programmed malware to evade detection by anti-virus software and erase files that might detect its presence.