As some of you know, I've started looking for a new role. As an applicant, it's critical to receive email responses reliably. Spam can and will get in the way. I want to give you a glimpse into what I went through. Let me tell you that I almost missed a screening request from a recruiter. If you are looking for a job or have been waiting for that important email that never came in, read this article.
tl;dr
- I erased over 20k messages - if it didn't "spark joy," I deleted it.
- Apple and Google 'automated spam' filters can vanish important emails
- Not all unsubscribe links are created equal
- If you can, disconnect from these 'free' providers. Get a bespoke personal email.
Step 1 - Clean Your Inbox
If your Inbox is overflowing with spam, promotions from vendors you bought something from once, five years ago, generic emails from various sites you visited once and unwittingly opted in to get emails, you are in my shoes.
I glanced at my Inbox, and it had over 20,000 emails. It's for a clean-up!
The easiest method I've found to do this is sorting by sender and mass deleting. Some are super easy. If you have thousands of unread messages like me, most spammers won't stop at two messages.
There's an excellent book/method by David Allen called "Getting Things Done" (GTD). Like all such methods, you can go overboard. Resist the temptation. Focus on the task at hand—cleaning your Inbox.
Step 2 - Check Your Spam Folder
Unfortunately, as I've discovered, both Apple and Google use automatic spam detection that can route valid emails to the Spam Folder. Check your Spam Folder. I recommend that you only go up to two weeks back. If you find any valid emails, move them from your Spam Folder to your Inbox. Responding to an email over two weeks old is similar to returning a voicemail after two weeks. If you do, please be sure to apologize.
Step 3 - Monitor Your Inbox and Unsubscribe
For the next week or two, be very pedantic. Pause and unsubscribe from every new email that hits your Inbox that you want to delete immediately.
Scattershot consumer protection regulations require all automated mailings to include an unsubscribe option. Apple even tries to include an unsubscribe button outside some emails. I don't know the mechanism, but it only catches 10-15 % of the automated mailings.
One thing that irks me is that most mass-mailers hide the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, in size five font, possibly even graying it out. Let's face it: If I'm considering unsubscribing, you trying to hide it from me will only annoy me and make me more determined to get your trash out of my Inbox.
Next, I get it. You are sorry to see me leave (I'm not sure why). You may even want to know why (as if anyone goes over these reports). Make it a true one-click unsubscribe, and make it optional for me to tell you why or even change my preferences. Your starting point should be removing me from your mailing list. Also, don't give me the "it may take several business days to remove your email address from our lists" message. You are not sending some poor intern to manually sift through the thousands of subscribers and manually extract my email address/record. If you can add me in the blink of an eye, you can remove me the same way.
Step 4: Moving forward - a Dedicated Bespoke Email
Warning: this is a more expensive and technically involved step. Proceed if you are comfortable.
You should create a new email address—one that is not publicly listed or known. If you can, register a custom vanity domain (these are pretty cheap). I went a couple of levels deeper. I opened a new Microsoft 365 tenant for that domain. In terms of feature-for-feature and cost/value, Microsoft offers superior email handling and filtering compared to Google, Apple, and most other providers. A slightly cheaper solution is to find a hosting provider that can also provide email hosting.
Guard that email address as hard as possible - if you start getting emails from services you never signed up for, guess what? A site you visited and provided your private email address on - sold it to a data broker. If that is the case - you can use a service that manages removal requests from the data brokers; some are more effective than others.