To ‘abandon’ my email address

[Lemonylemony]

I’ve had the same email for about 15 years since I left uni. It is completely out of control. I miss emails because they are buried in tonnes of mailing list crap. No amount of unsubscribing, filtering and streamlining I’ve attempted over the last few years have helped. I currently have over 65,000 unread messages.

I’m considering just starting a new email and leaving this one. Change my address with the companies/services I actually need to and go from there. AIBU? Or should I be devoting hours/days to clearing it out?

I also pick through Unsubscribe and click whatever comes up every month.

But moslty I don't read junk mail. Always open email from people I like. Once a month I select Unread and delete the lot. Over time this shrinks to almost zero. The first time can be scary as you delete thousands of emails at a strike

If that sounds too scary look at the first unwanted email. Unsubscribe the search for all message from that organisation, delete the lot! Do that for 5 minutes a day and you'll be free of it all in less than a week!

I agree with having different email addresses for different purposes.

As for all the emails, it depends on who they are from. Using 'unsubscribe' is fine for legitimate companies who send too many emails or when you no longer want to hear from them but I had an email address that obviously ended up being sold on. I got so many spam emails about Russian girls, viagra and fake discounts that I deleted it and set up a new account. Fingers crossed, it's worked.

@LolaSmiles you can change this in settings. It's set up this way initially to prevent you accidentally deleting stuff you want, but I changed mine and it made my email life so much easier and less angry!

One main barrier is not having a computer at home to be honest, trying to manage it all via the phone app. It is not just a few minutes a day, haha, that idea is funny . I did a massive detox/delete/filter etc around 5 years ago (spent an entire day on it and it was under 10,000 then - whoever thinks you can sort through 65,000 emails in half an hour is either deluded or The Doctor) but it clearly didn’t take and since having to rely on phone only it’s got ridiculous. When we move house I want a proper computer in the home office to make it easier to manage things online esp as there’ll be so many more bills and insurances etc.

Anyway thanks for the support vipers 95% I am reasonable to “abandon” and move on to a better system. Lots of interesting ideas too. Cheers m’dears!

I have purges..

I get the emails in ‘from’ order and delete 100s at a time.

I can get rid of several 1000 in a sitting and leaving those I may need/want later.

whoever thinks you can sort through 65,000 emails in half an hour is either deluded

Not in half an hour, but with a computer you can do it relatively quickly. For instance, having once ordered pizzas online I found my spam mail full of stuff from pizza delivery companies. I just put in "pizza" as a search term, hit control+a and delete and within a second there are 500 fewer messages in my inbox.

@Justreadingtheforum3

Start a number of them. I do.

I have "not my name but to show you an example"

[email protected] (main)
[email protected] (for anything like shop wanting to send receipts, Amazon etc).
[email protected] (for less important stuff)
[email protected] (holiday, hotels, events)

I leave them all logged in on my phone. It means my main email is kept tidy.

This!

What a brilliant idea. Makes it so easy too.

How/why does thousands of emails happen? Do you not know how to click delete

Thousands of emails happen because all the companies are blatantly ignoring GDPR and use a casual visit to a website where you accept the cookies without going down the wormhole to find out exactly what you are accepting as permission to email you morning noon and night. It wasn't supposed to work like that.

We were promised that if we ignored all those GDPR emails requesting permission to be kept on mailing lists we would never hear from them again unless we specifically requested it and pre ticked acceptance boxes were not allowed.

So why are we all now receiving more spam than ever?

why are we all now receiving more spam than ever

I am not... I don't have this problem. Some of us figure something else out. Deal with, unsubscribe, no promotions please tick box, delete or file. Repeat.

My email account (hotmail) has a clutter filter plus a junk folder that automatically moves most adverty stuff to it. Every day or so I skim the headers and delete everything. It works well.

Don’t abandon the old one but it needs to become your junk email! I have the email attached to my msn from when I was 14, then I have my actual email. All shopping, subscriptions go through the junk email account. I’m on an iPhone, so I have the two accounts added, for the junk, I have a quick search through to check there’s nothing of interest but mark all as read. If you need to search for an order or something the emails are still there. Anything personal goes to my other account, so I still get junk but nowhere near as much.

A few years ago I accidentally deleted all the emails in my in box. After the initial panic that Id deleted something important I felt relief and then as emails came in I unsubscribed to all the ones I don’t want and the inbox has been manageable since.
If it gets out of hand again I’ll delete the lot

I've got 89,880 emails in my gmail inbox.
At what point will it explode? 100k?

I agree with @BarbaraofSeville, I’m sure GDPR is being breached. No one in their right mind would knowingly sign up to many of the emails I am getting.
On the bright side this thread inspired me to do a set of ‘unsubscribes’ last night.

One main barrier is not having a computer at home to be honest, trying to manage it all via the phone app. It is not just a few minutes a day, haha, that idea is funny

I don't have a computer at home - just phones and tablet - and I manage my emails on my phone easily within a few minutes every morning/evening because I have a system and deal with things daily and that is using a Yahoo mailbox app with very basic functions.

It will take you longer because you have a huge backlog that you are letting develop because you arent dealing with the emails regularly.

I did a massive detox/delete/filter etc around 5 years ago (spent an entire day on it and it was under 10,000 then - whoever thinks you can sort through 65,000 emails in half an hour is either deluded or The Doctor) but it clearly didn’t take and since having to rely on phone only it’s got ridiculous.

So 65K messages have come in in the last 5 years that you havent dealt with? Clearly the issue is the fact you dont have a reliable system or any sort of regular purging.

As for the time, yes it might take longer than 30 minutes to purge 65k emails, but you've let them build up for 5 years. You can do it in small chunks but you need to find a way to keep it under control or else any new email is just going to be as bad.

Start off by putting everything existing in a general folder, so your main inbox is empty so you can start from 0, but you can go through the old emails at your leisure.

Then every day commmit to spending 5 minutes keeping on top of your inbox. Skim the daily email and immediately delete junk - I go through, open anything I want to keep and then just highlight all "unread" emails and delete them enmass - and then file any important emails to your inbox folders set up in your organizing style. I have a general folder for Bills with sub folders for each category (water/energy/internet and phone etc) so if I just have 5 minutes I dump all bill emails in the general folder and then when I have more time I will go through and file them into the right sub folder.

This will prevent your new emails from getting out of control and allow you to deal with the backlog when you have a bit of extra time. It may still take more than half an hour to clear that but by spending 5 minutes a day keeping up with current emails then you aren't making the situation worse.

To deal with the backlog, it doesnt have to be done in one go, you can chip away at it in any small chunk of time you can find - the 10 minutes on the bus, the 5 minutes waiting for DC to come out of an activity, the couple of minutes of an ad break on a TV show etc.

Go to your backlog folder and the first email you see, search the company name/key word to bring up every email from them. If it is something important - bills/statements or things you need to keep - select them all and put them in a dedicated folder for that company/category. If it is junk then select them all and hit the delete button. Do the same for the next email, and the next until they're all dealt with. It will take time but this method will get rid of hundreds of emails at a time as you are breaking it down into groups of repetitive emails rather than trying to deal with each one individually.

Some companies have started emailing during the lockdown every day and some at least once. I know they're desperate but it's very invasive. I just had to click unsubscribe in all newly received emails and now receive fewer emails.

Then every day commmit to spending 5 minutes keeping on top of your inbox

Why on earth should we have to do this?
They are emailing us illegally because GDPR.

No-one wants to be bombarded with crap and no-one wants to dedicate brain space to getting rid of it all.

I felt the exact same way as you. I put aside 16 hrs (admittedly on long haul flights with wifi). I unsubscibed from thousands of mailing list. The majority of them were super dispersive, you really had to read the small print. In a few cases when I hit unsubscibe and hit ok, they actually tried signing me up to more emails.

Why on earth should we have to do this?
They are emailing us illegally because GDPR.

Because not every email is spam/unsolicited? Because by taking 5 minutes a day to check her email, the OP will save herself from getting to 65k emails building up in future? It's no different to doing the washing up or running a load of laundry every day so that it doesnt build up to the point of having no clean dishes or pants left.

Every morning while I wait for the kettle to boil I take a few minutes to go through my personal emails, the same in the evening after dinner.

I deal with any genuine emails - either filing them, responding (if necessary) or flagging to deal with later - and then just delete any junk. All easily completed in 5 minutes of otherwise wasted time out of my day

It takes seconds because I do it every day. If I let my inbox build up even just for a week, then it could be 100s of emails, but once a day morning and evening it's 20 at most.

I’ve just switched my work emails on as have been off for 2 weeks. 1600 emails. So first job will be to sift through the crap. Then deal with the work emails. By crap I mean newsletters updates etc.

I have an email address I give to companies who are forcing me to provide one but are ultimately not important and another for anything that actually matters or I'm doing business with. That massively helps.

^Every morning while I wait for the kettle to boil I take a few minutes to go through my personal emails, the same in the evening after dinner.

I deal with any genuine emails - either filing them, responding (if necessary) or flagging to deal with later - and then just delete any junk. All easily completed in 5 minutes of otherwise wasted time out of my day^

I never take my phone into the kitchen and already use that time to empty and fill the dishwasher, feed the cats, check the fridge and cupboards for anything that needs using up and all manner of other quick jobs that actually need doing so I'm never going to spend it doing something that I shouldn't actually need to do in the first place.

I'm on my third i've started using the name of the company im signing up to in brackets next to my name when i sign up to websites so i know who sold my data on. Not that it makes a difference though but it's still interesting to see the websites that promise not to use your data pass it on within weeks

I have two email accounts, one main one for the important stuff and one burner account for signups (and MN actually, if you tag me I'll be lucky to see it).

If I'm doing mass deleting I sort by sender name - almost every email has an unsubscribe option on so no way would I sort by that as I might miss something!

I had the same email address for years and although it did get a bit spammed, the service provider stopped it and there were a few things I missed changing the address on.

delete the whole damn lot and start with a clean box.
click spam for ones you dont want to follow