One of the tragedies I see when helping family and friends with their computer problems is the abundance of junk in their email inbox. The number of unread emails due to spam, unwanted promotions, and subscriptions would bother anyone with a compulsion to keep their unread email count at zero.
The way I control and combat the onslaught of unwanted emails is to create a dedicated second email account with the purpose to collect this type of email. This frees up my personal email to receive messages only from people with which I care to communicate.
The secondary email address is used to register accounts on websites, or provide to retailers that offer incentives to give up your email address. It’s the only login id that I need to remember, and if the email is sold to third-parties, authorized or not, then any unsolicited junk mail will join the chorus of other unread emails already received at that address. Effectively, it is an unmonitored email address I give out when I don’t care about what the other party is offering, similar to the ubiquitous ‘no reply’ email addresses that all companies use when blasting emails out to their mailing lists. The inbox for that email is full of junk that I don’t care about. So much so that the number of unread email messages has surpassed the 100,000 mark. This does not even include the amount of spam that is already filtered by the large email provider.
There were other strategies that I had considered to combat clutter, such as using the ‘+’ symbol to filter emails. For instance, if I signed up to Facebook, I would use the email address trubbleshootr+facebook@example.com (not an actual email address). However, this would lead to an explosion of filters that would need to be remembered, unless I was systematic with the way in which I determined the filter word. Also problematic, not all websites allow the ‘+’ symbol in an email address, although it is a perfectly valid character in an email address.
With a dedicated email address to collect junk email, my personal email inbox is blissfully clean and manageable. I can keep the unread count at a comforting zero value and only receive notifications when someone actually wants to reach me.
If it is too late to protect your primary email address with a secondary junk one, I would recommend abandoning the email address and start a fresh primary email address. Only give the new email out to people with whom you wish to communicate, and let your existing email become the secondary email where it can continue to collect junk.
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