10,000 emails
February 18, 2007
I’ve had my Yahoo! mail account for about 10 years now. It started out as a Rocketmail account and later became a Yahoo! mail account when RM got acquired. Recently I realized that I had about 6,500 unread emails which is insane.
In the spirit of making my life more simple I decided to unsubscribe to every subscription that isn’t crucial to my existence and to delete a lot of worthless old messages. I started with unsubscribing to about 50 newsletters and updated many online accounts with my new Boxbe.com account that forces the sender to pay to reach me.
I ended up deleting close to 10,000 emails. One might wonder why someone wants to do this in the age of unlimited storage? My take is that it’s a wonderful katharsis experience, a way of reclaiming my online persona and privacy.
My email is now solely for friends, iTunes notifications and a few key accounts. The rest is going to have to pay to tap into my lifetime value.
