I meant to give this update three weeks ago at the halfway point but things got busy.
On January 1st this year I decided to unsubscribe from every email that was unsolicited or that I no longer needed to care about. Here are the results through yesterday:
Spam emails received year-to-date |
Plus emails I no longer wish to get that I previously subscribed to |
Un-subscribes via links in the email sent to me |
Un-subscribes by replying with “Remove” – I have an Outlook Quick-Action set up for this |
Un-subscribes that failed |
Spam free days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2,280 | 246 | 2,021 | 505 | 87 | 11 |
My first spam-free day was March 17th and I have had two back to back spam-free days since (June 20/21 and this week July 18/19).
My average daily spam-load is down to less than 10 unsolicited emails from a first month average of over 40. Microsoft Clutter is helping in the task too but it does have about a 1% false-positive rate.
A disturbing trend I have noticed is that I am now getting an increase in spam on my new business email. Recently the company I work for was acquired and I now have an email address with their domain to RECEIVE email (I still use the old domain for outgoing email). I have not used it for anything except the receipt of business-email and yet the spammers are on to it.
I have noticed that there are many common unsubscribe services that vendors use that offer “unsubscribe from all emails” but they only offer this for the particular sender one is responding to. They should offer an “unsubscribe from all senders” option too.
Most unsubscribe services automatically unsubscribe you and then ask for a reason why. I have not provided the reason ever.
Some unsubscribe services require one to enter one’s email address as confirmation. This is annoying. Some send a confirmation email that one has been unsubscribed: this too is annoying as it defeats the purpose of unsubscribing.
There is an increasing habit for spammers to make the unsubscribe link in the smallest possible font and the latest trend to offer the link in a font color one degree different from the background color of the email making the link hard to find. A few put the link text in a graphic which requires the images to be downloaded before unsubscribing: clever but also annoying.
However, most annoying of all award goes to Oracle whose unsubscribe link takes one to their subscription page when one has to log on to unsubscribe. Bad form Larry – you can do better than that.
Watch out for the year end summary, or the first 3-day spam-free run, whichever comes first.
BizTechFuturist 