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!

Can I blame yesterday’s Gmail outage for the lack of a post today? No?

Just in case you didn’t know it, Gmail, Google’s email service which has been in beta since 2004, went down Tuesday afternoon, and didn’t come back fully until late in the evening. Google attributed the problem to server changes which may have overloaded their router traffic. That’s tech talk for the drain got clogged. (I recommend G-drano, Google guys).

Gmail has over 146 million users worldwide, and most of them were unable to access the service for much of the day. This is the second major outage this year. The prior one occurred on February 24, when Gmail was out for about 2.5 hours. You can read about that one here on Skylarking under Gmail Crashes Again. Did that say, “Again”? The major outage prior to that was October 2008 when Gmail was out for 30 hours without explanation.

Major outages aside, PC World reports that there have been several minor outages, too, prior to the last February’s outage:

• July 16, 2008: A similar “502 error” (bad gateway) struck Gmail, leading to what was described as a “long outage” by affected users.

• August 6, 2008: Technical trouble knocked an “undetermined number” of Gmail users (including both regular users and paying Google Apps clients) out of their mail for about 15 hours.

• August 11, 2008: An issue with Google’s “contacts system” caused Gmail access to go offline for a “couple of hours” for numerous users. Both individual accounts and Google Apps accounts were affected again.

• August 15, 2008: The third outage within a span of two weeks left users locked out of their accounts for more than 24 hours. That pesky “502 server error” popped up on the Gmail login page here, too.

• October 16, 2008: Users went a full 30 hours without access. Google didn’t elaborate on what caused the issue.

Google claimed in an IDG News Service report that “Gmail suffers only about 10 to 15 minutes of downtime each month”.

I guess I should be thanking Gmail for today’s post. “Thanks, Gmail!” Love skylarkingblog at gmail.com