Junk mail is, quite simply, a part of our existence. It certainly has been apart of mine since I’ve been living on my own. When I was in School I would get HUGE amounts of flyers and whatnot whenever I would go and check my mail. It probably accounted for half the stuff in my mail box.
Now I get digital junk mail, as I’m sure you do as well. any time you sign up for a service or an e-store you will very likely get littered with mail about sales and promotions all the time (I know I do). At the end of 2017 it was getting to the point that at least half the mail that I was getting was junk. I decided to take action. I have done this a couple of times before and it took about a month to get it all under control.
For me, this means avoiding the delete button anytime junk mail came up. Instead, I would go into the e-mail and hit the unsubscribe button. Hitting delete may be more satisfying, but you end up playing a game of whack-a-mole with your e-mail trying to keep up with the flood of junk mail.
Keeping your e-mail clean is one of the easiest ways to Organize your Digital Life. Another way of making sure that you minimize the amount of junk mail is to go through your settings in all of your social media accounts and any other online accounts. To do this you will have to go to your notification settings.
The only thing is that you have to ensure that you stay on top of it. What I tend to do is go through my junk mail every few months or so and hit the unsubscribe a few times. Typically, if there is more than one setting for a notification when you click the unsubscribe button in your e-mail you’ll be directed to the companies page where you can manage your notifications as you see fit. Whittling down your e-mail like this takes time, believe me, I know, but it’s worth it. When you’re able to look at all the mail in your inbox and only see things that you will actually use, you will find that the number of e-mails you get will be greatly reduced.
How many notifications do you get? Would you par them down or keep them as is?
Let me know in the comments section below. If you like this blog post and want to see more, you can follow me on Social Media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @jasonlovefiles) or Subscribe to my blog to get new content delivered directly to your mailbox.
Jason great information. I do find sometimes even though I unsubscribe I continue to receive the emails. Are there companies that have to manually remove your email?
Thanks
Good question. I would start by saying that sometimes Companies will have “multiple forms” of e-mails. this means that if you unsubscribe to their “weekly promotions” e-mail (for example) it doesn’t mean you’ve unsubscribed from their “Special offers” e-mail list. In cases like that they will have a button on the e-mail saying “all e-mail settings” which will take you to a website where you can unsubscribe from all thier mailouts.
I typically unsubscribe whenever a piece of junkmail comes in, but sometimes I get mail from organizations I do not recognize. I always wonder if those are “phishing” e-mails we are always warned to delete and hesitate to click “unsubscribe”. Is this a reasonable fear?
This can be a completely justifiable concern. I have a blog post about how to Identify phishing e-mail attempts which I would recommend you check out. https://jasonlovefiles.com/5-tips-to-avoid-phishing-scams/