My email account has been hijacked with hundreds of daily emails!
I have a morning routine: Every day I get up long before my husband, make the coffee and sit down with my iPad or computer and read RVtravel.com, then I read about new homes on the market to check prices, and then I go diligently through my email. I have somehow gotten on a wide variety of email mailing lists from quizzes to blogs, ads for RV maintenance, RV sales, old wheelchairs and walker searches for my dad, and the one I can’t resist opening, no matter how many emails have populated my inbox overnight—Recommended Reads.
There is always “The Bizarre True Story of Central Park’s Doomed Victorian Dinosaur Museum” to click on…
In Recommended Reads is a list of some of the most engaging and some of the most mundane short reads on a myriad of different topics from different websites. I somehow can’t resist clicking on the “Best used cars under $25,000” or “The Bizarre True Story of Central Park’s Doomed Victorian Dinosaur Museum”. This is, of course, when I should be writing for RVtravel.com. Today, I clicked on an article about the sin of using salted butter in baking. I don’t bake. Geez, I hardly cook, much less bake.
Do I really need to know about using salted or unsalted butter?
After spending an inordinate amount of time reading about the French bakers that are now turning to salted butter, I thought about the limited amount of time left in the morning, the day, and on planet Earth. Are brain cells limited too? How much more useless info can I stuff in there?
My email and mornings have been hijacked
I need my mornings back. I need my email back. It has been hijacked! The emails seem to spawn overnight. I need to have more time to look at our readers’ emails and do my job. Taking a deep breath, I find the unsubscribe link. I have discovered that the “unsubscribe” button, while required by law, has gotten smaller and smaller, is harder to find and sometimes requires going through multiple pages to finally unsubscribe. I especially want to unsubscribe from emails I didn’t subscribe to in the first place!
Unsubscribe is painfully hard
It is hard, almost painful. What if I had wanted to read that? What if it was something important that I really needed to know? Something our readers needed to know?
Then I thought with relief, I can always go to my email trash. Those thousands of emails linger for months. There is always another chance to suck up my time with interesting but not-so-useful articles. Of course, I always keep my RVtravel.com newsletter alerts.
Spam email and spam phone calls. At least the costs of postage has put a slow down to junk mail.
I date back to Hollerith cards (aka the IBM punch card) and have stayed fairly current in technology. Here is my trick for controlling spam mail…
First I have my own Internet domain . Costs me a whopping $15 a year and I rent web space for it at $3 a month. It’s not much of a web site and doesn’t matter.
Second, I have two email accounts. one is named and ONLY for close friends and family. The other is for all the commercial places I visit that require an email address. This second account is also configured as a ‘catch-all’ account. In other words if an email comes to my domain that does not have a recognized mailbox name, it goes to this account.
I can make up mailbox names on the fly. So when I shop online at xyz retail, I give them an email address of xyzretail@.
When I sit down to look at email, the important stuff is in my personal mailbox. Everything else is in the other mailbox. I always include the ‘From’ column so I can see who sent the email – I’ll know immediately if it is from xyz retail.
Last, and this is the only ‘techie’ part. I can create mail handling rules in my email application. If xyz retail doesn’t honor my unsubscribe request. I simply create a simple rule to automatically delete emails from xyzretail@.
okay… heads up. This comment system strips out anything placed between left & right angle brackets. Tells me it is treating them as format controls and my information is just text not a formatting command. So, I’ll put a little of that back in using square brackets. An internet domain is [name].[type, e.g. com, edu, gov, or org] following each of the xyzretail@[my domain] Hope that helps.
I agree. Even sending the worthless stuff to trash takes a lot of time, there is so much of it. I probably spend upwards of two hours a day checking email. A lot of better things to do with my time.
Also, unsubscribing has it’s pitfalls. My understanding is much of the time it doesn’t work and might even be used against you.
Spamming is quite the problem. I mean how many tools can a person win from Harbor Freight in a week right? How many can you report as phishing? It’s quite the effort to keep the inbox and trash clean. What gets me is the target, unsuspecting older adults, can get taken to the cleaners.
Thanks Nanci! That was a great laugh :))
Oh Nanci, I read everything you write. Today YOU screwed up my computer routine. I lost 30 minutes learning about butter! Stuff I didn’t need to know and didn’t want to know and will probably forget. I was compelled to keep on reading because “Nanci said so.” Never fear, I will continue to open your articles anyway.
Thank you, Nanci! I use gmail and I often can flag unwanted email as “mark as spam and unsubscribe.” Perhaps you can acquire a gmail account and transfer much (all?) of your elective email to it. If so, perhaps unsubscribing can become a tad easier.
Nanci, isn’t interesting how quickly you are expected to hand over the email address when you are out shopping/ dining? The email has been hijacked by those who expect YOU to share it with them for their benefit… I absolutely deny those come ons for the email and most people are shocked! I also have the multiple emails to sort out the garbage from those important emails . Good luck with the unsubscribe efforts