I’ve been surprised recently to hear from a couple of friends that they are inundated with email. I found this puzzling because these are not people who work full-time and thus need to deal with a flood of work-related emails. They are retired. When I inquired further, I learned that most of the troublesome mail is from companies these people have done business with and non-profit or political organizations they support.
When I asked my friends why they don’t unsubscribe from those senders’ mailing lists, I heard a couple of answers. One is that they assume that unsubscribing won’t work, that most of these outfits will continue to send them mail even after they unsubscribe, and that doing so may even alert the sender that there is a live person at their email address.
Another reason is that some of the mail, perhaps even a lot of it, is from charitable organizations that my friends support. They feel that unsubscribing would be a snub of sorts, like they’re turning their back on a group they believe in.
So I’d like to go on the record as saying that neither of these is a good reason to put up with unwanted email.
First, let me clarify that what I’m referring to here is unwanted but legitimate email rather than true spam. By “true spam,” I mean unsolicited mass mailings from outfits you’ve never done business with. Some email providers do a good job of filtering this stuff out so that most of it never makes it to your inbox, and some have a button you can click to tell your provider that you consider a given message to be spam. I use Gmail, which does both those things, and I get very little actual spam.
But that still leaves the unwanted email that’s “legitimate” in that it comes from someone who obtained our email address honestly — a company we’ve purchased something from or an organization we’ve contributed to. (In the case of political contributions, I am including mail you get from like-minded candidates or organizations that share mailing lists with the one to which you contributed.) The important thing about all these groups, unlike some creep peddling fake Viagra from their basement in Novosibirsk, is that they care about what you think of them. They don’t want to needlessly annoy their customers or supporters, and for that reason almost all of them honor unsubscribe requests.
Some companies let you specify whether you want to be added to their mailing list when you make a purchase (of course, this is almost always in the form of a box you need to uncheck rather than a box you need to check), but many do not — if you order something, you go on their list. But the first time you get a mailing from them, you can go to the bottom of the list and click the link to unsubscribe. Many will then ask why you’re leaving. You’re welcome to tell them, but you’ll still be unsubscribed if you don’t.
It may be a little trickier with organizations that you support. One friend of mine said she was concerned that unsubscribing from her favorite non-profits might signal a lack of appreciation. She also worried that she might forget to contribute to them if she didn’t get their emails. I proposed that she decide how often she wanted to make donations to those groups, put reminders on her calendar to do so at designated times, and then unsubscribe from their mailing lists. I suggested that these groups were unlikely to be demoralized by her choosing to unsubscribe as long as she continued to support them financially.
Of course, there may be some groups that you actually do want to hear from as a way of keeping tabs on what they’re doing. But then those emails don’t really qualify as “unwanted.” You can’t reasonably complain about getting mail that you’d miss if you didn’t receive it.
The bottom line is, there is no need to be overwhelmed by email unless you’re in a job where a lot of email comes with the territory. Unsubscribing works most of the time, and you can support your favorite charities without being on their mailing lists.