Day 2: Unsubscribe from Junk Email
The best way to handle a worthless email is to never get it.
Junk mail is dangerous, especially in digital form. While it only takes a few seconds to delete a single junk message, deleting a newsletter every day for the next year will consume over 30 minutes that you'll never get back! Worse yet, when important emails are mixed in with unimportant ones, it's easy to lose track of the ones that require our action. Because they look so similar in the Inbox view, we spend too much mental energy sorting the good from the bad.
Are you overwhelmed by junk mail? Don't give up! You have a powerful weapon on your side: the unsubscribe link. The unsubscribe link is powerful because it eliminates unwanted email before it arrives. And it should always work. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, senders of commercial email must provide recipients with a method of opt-ing out.
Your mission today is to unsubscribe from as many newsletters, updates, and social media alerts as possible in 20 minutes. Here's how to make the most of that time:
To do: Estimated Time: 20 min
1. Look through the marketing emails that are currently in your inbox. For any that you don't read regularly or don't find valuable:
- Check the bottom of the mail for an unsubscribe link. Click it, and follow the steps to remove yourself from the list, then delete the message.
- If there is no unsubscribe link, mark the message as spam.
2. Edit your notification preferences on social networks so that you only see email notifications for things you care about. The most high-volume social networks include:
- Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/help/1494489147514872/)
- Google+ (https://plus.google.com/settings/plus)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/settings/notifications)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/settings/)
- Quora (http://www.quora.com/settings)
3. Have a few minutes left? Use the following search terms to find newsletters that you missed. Enter each of these terms into your email search box, and the results will be overwhelmingly dominated by marketing email. For each one of the newsletters and deal emails that turns up, decide if staying on that list is worth the time, and if not, unsubscribe.
- unsubscribe
- manage notifications
- update preferences
- "remove me"
- "remove yourself"
- "mailing list"
- "email list"
- "click here"
Share today's info:
Final Thoughts
| Deleting one daily deal email every day for a year will add up to over 30 minutes! | Tweet |
| The CAN-SPAM Act requires that all marketing emails include an unsubscribe link. | Tweet |
| To find marketing messages, search your email for "unsubscribe" or "mailing list" | Tweet |
| The best way to handle a worthless email is to never get it. | Tweet |
Yesterday, we made strides to reduce interruptions from email, and today we took the first step toward lowering your overall email load by getting rid of repeated messages that we don't want. Tomorrow, we'll work on more effectively finding the messages that we do want.