One of the smartest goals I made over the course of the winter break from academics was to STOP SPAM.  In November, I began to realize that my junk mail filter would catch some things that I actually didn’t want to be junk mail.  Some was actually mail from colleagues, and others were a sale that I was actually interested in from a favorite store.  Conversely, I would often  wake up in the morning with upwards of thirty e-mails that were truly junk mail if I didn’t have all of my filters set up properly. So, I decided to make a big goal for the winter break – try my best to really specify my filters so that I was only getting the mail that I wanted.

This task actually ended up being much easier than I felt it would be from the onset.  First, I decided to immediately delete every single G-Mail filter I had set up, and I reinstated my decision to have all of my accounts come to one inbox. I synced each of the fou re-mail accounts I have (Virginia Tech, personal G-Mail, Aspetto, personal Yahoo!) with each device that I check e-mail on (my iPad, iPhone, and Apple’s desktop mail application). Then, I deleted every single filter I had set up, on each account.

After this process was complete – the e-mail started flooding it.  At least once every ten minutes.  In the past, I used my old Yahoo! account that I created in, like, the 7th grade, for any junk mail purposes.  This is quite common – if you want to sign up for a quick mailing list, just put in that older, “dummy” e-mail address.  While some of the e-mails that come into that account are still useful, most aren’t.

So at this point, I began what was a few-day long process. Each day I would let the messages build up in my inbox, and then I would sit down at the end of the day and scroll all the way down to the bottom of each message that I felt was irrelevant. I was looking for one word, and one word only:

Unsubscribe.

I don’t know if it’s some kind of law, but just about every spam e-mail or mass e-mail listing that I was a part of had this denotation at the end of the e-mail.  It usually read like this: “If you would like to unsubscribe <insert your e-mail address or identity here> from this e-mail listing, please click here.” At that point you have to enter the e-mail address that the message was sent to, and you’re on your way.  Sometimes, it takes a few hours or even a few business days for the request to be processed, but it’s worth it!

So it takes about 60 seconds per e-mail list, or so, but now when I wake up in the morning I’ll have about a dozen e-mails.  Some are what I expect – e-mails from colleagues who stay up late, my bank account balance daily e-mail, the daily Whipple report for Virginia News, etc.  But gone are the mornings of waking up to numerous advertisements that maybe were relevant when I signed up for a list 10 years ago, but I couldn’t care less about now.

Deleting spam out of your life can be very time consuming. Before you sit down and get to actual e-mail, you could find yourself sifting through at least 30-40 junk messages which can take 5 minutes to delete, accurately, even if you’re just reading the headline.  I’m so happy to have that time saved in my every day life now!

I’d encourage this article that contains more tips on how to stop spam if you’re interested!