OPINION

Mullis: Going on an 'unsubscribing' rampage

Nicole L.V. Mullis
For the Enquirer

Email is my family’s information pipeline and the pipes are ready to burst.

Nicole L.V. Mullis

I blame myself.

I used to be disciplined with our email accounts — reading, archiving and deleting daily. I had folders with names like “school,” “work” and “family.”

Then the bills moved online. Then the schools moved online. Then the sport teams, parent organizations, newspapers, camps, charities, Christmas…

“Reply All” was killing me.

I gave up archiving and started “searching.” I don’t remember when my inbox developed a “search box,” only that it was the first time I wanted to kiss my computer. Now I could find a digital needle in a digital haystack…until my lack of deleting caught up with me.

Recently, when I searched for “cross-country food list,” it gave me four years of cross-country food lists, reply-alls included.

That’s another haystack, not a needle.

I accept that these school and activity emails are supposed to be there. The fact that some date back to 2012 is my fault. What doesn’t feel like my fault is the gratuitous amount of junk mail mixed in with these emails.

It’s not technically “spam” because I gave these folks my email address in exchange for things like “free shipping” or “15 percent off the total purchase” or because I wanted to stream Tiger games over the Internet.

I get junk mail from Amazon all the way to Zillow. Every ticket vendor I’ve ever used, every kid-related organization, every dum-dum retailer who requires me to have a special card to get the sale price — they send me emails and they send them constantly.

Some are newsletters, some are coupons, some are reminders that they sent me a coupon.

I try to be proactive. I always “unclick” the box during registration that says “Yes! Send me a prodigious amount of daily spam!”

It doesn’t matter. They do it anyway, so I ignore them or passive-aggressively mass delete them.

However, on Day Two of my “2016 cross-country food list” search, I received 73 junk emails before 8 a.m. One particular big box retailer that shall remain nameless — you know who you are — was responsible for five of them.

Remember unlisted phone numbers? I wish I had an unlisted email address.

Instead of mass deleting them all, I opened one. I scrolled past the ads and the pictures and the flashing links to the very, very, very bottom. There, in the palest gray lettering, in the finest of fine print, I saw the word “unsubscribe.”

Click!

It took me to a webpage, where I had the pleasure of removing my email address from their mailing list. It was more satisfying than free shipping.

I poured myself some coffee and started unsubscribing.

Some of these were not so easy. Some required a seven-day waiting period. Some required me to tell them why. Some required me to un-click every individual communication they sent me, which for a certain store that I bought an appliance from, required several boxes.

Click, click, click, click, click, click and click!

The next morning, I had half the junk. The day after that, even less. Soon I was only getting one or two, which I was quick to unsubscribe from before delving into the deep end of my email ocean.

Such discipline.

If only I could find that stinking food list.

Nicole L.V. Mullis is the author of “A Teacher Named Faith”. She can be reached at nlvm.columns@gmail.com or www.NicoleLVMullis.com