7 Days In Email Hell

jfruhlinger writes "If you first went on line in the '90s, you probably remember a time when every e-mail you received was exciting, or at least relevant, and was worthy of your personal attention. One brave writer decided to take that approach to his present-day overflowing inbox. He read every email he received and dealt with them all, either by replying, filing, or unsubscribing. He even scanned his spam filter for false positives. It was a lot harder than he thought it would be."

Re:I must be lucky

[phantomfive]

I can't comment on other people, but the guy in the article is someone who has subscribed to over 50 newsletters that he doesn't want to read. In the article he complains about his poor personal management skills, insults people who don't agree with him politically, insults people who do agree with him politically, and complains.

What he doesn't do is explain why a common email management scheme is hell.

This guy is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's on too many mailing lists and has never filtered down the information he gets to something manageable.

I don't delete stuff from my inbox. If I've read it, that's fine, but it's perfectly acceptable for me to just search when I need something particular. In ancient times I used to make folders that were months (or years) when I got stuff, but that was an artificial structure, and not particularly useful.

Re:Multiple accounts....

[Anonymous Coward]

For anything sketchy I just use http://spambox.us/. You can create a temporary email address that is forwarded to you're regular account and set it for deletion after a period of time (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc.)

Re:Gmail is your problem

[Aequitarum Custos]

Gmail has given me the LEAST spam of the 3 big name providers (Google/Yahoo/Microsoft), including when I had my own e-mail server with spamassassin. Not sure what problems you have with Gmail, but false positive rate is minimal and I rarely get more than 50 -actual- spam messages a month. Rest is notifications/newsletters I actually signed up for, or work related.

Re:Your own domain

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use gmail, you can do something similar with a dash. For example, [e-mail] is the same account as [e-mail]. Doing things like [e-mail], and creating a filter on that destination address yields fantastic results. You can also add any number of periods to your email address, i.e. [e-mail] is the same as [e-mail] and [e-mail].

Re:I don't remember those 90s...

[Miamicanes]

I do the same thing with hyphens and Qmail. It's practically eliminated spam as a problem for nearly a decade. The only two problems I have are people (and businesses) that get freaked out seeing an email address like [e-mail], and websites that want an email address to recover a login (if I can't figure out what address I made up for that particular site... I have semi-standards, but they don't always work 100%).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:If this was an email...

[Anonymous Coward]

Relying on Baysian neural networks to seed the pseudo random logic

Bayesian networks [wikipedia.org] are completely different from neural networks [wikipedia.org]. And they're not used for "seeding" any "psuedorandom logic"; bayes nets and neural nets are just useful for classification tasks, such as "spam" or "not spam."