By Dennis D. McDonald

Every year around this time I go through an extensive “unsubscribe” exercise in order to reduce the volume of emails I receive.

The process is labor intensive. I have four main email addresses including a yahoo.com address I have had for at least 15 years that no longer forwards my email to my main address. Not only am I laboriously deleting yahoo email (I recently deleted over 49,000 yahoo emails) but I am also continuing my move away from Gmail to Outlook as my central service.

I have found Outlook and the entire Microsoft ecosystem (partly because of my Outlook 365 subscription) to be much better organized and easier to use than the Google ecosystem. Also, Microsoft’s user interface is more elegant than Google’s even though my main computer is a MacBook Pro, not a Windows machine. That the Microsoft environment spreads so well across my iPhone and iPad (as well as my Linux machine) is an added bonus.

The unsubscribing process involves a lot more than just hitting an incoming email’s “unsubscribe” link.

First, you have to find the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. That’s not always easy. Some emails make the text at the bottom the same color as the background so hunting can be required.

Second, not all Unsubscribe forms automatically link to the email address you are responding to. Given that I have engaged in a lot of email forwarding in the past that sometimes requires some additional checking to determine what the actual target email was originally.

Third, not everyone tells you why you are receiving the email in the first place. Some subscriptions are lost in the mists of time (“Was I really interested in that topic?”) while others are obviously the results of address sharing. For example, my wife and I make political donations. The sharing of our email addresses is rampant and often results in our receiving donation requests from candidates we have never heard of.

While I continue to receive a small number of outright “spam” and “phishing” emails — both Google and Microsoft are pretty good at tagging these — the reality is that I am much less engaged with email as a means for interacting with family and close friends than I was in the past. I now employ services such as Instagram and text messaging for such focused purposes having given up on services such as Facebook and Twitter long ago, plus I tightly control the use of client email accounts. I am also curtailing use of the social network MeWe (my replacement when Google+ went belly up) if it does not get its proliferating Trumpist spambot plague under control.

But I do suspect that as the year moves forward I will once again find myself next year around this time going through the “email unsubscribe” dance.

Copyright (c) 2021 by Dennis D. McDonald