With the Christmas holidays in full swing, itâs a busy, busy time of year.
And nowhere is that more apparent than in our email inboxes. Companies are reaching out to us with a constant stream of last-minute gift ideas, online specials, and more.
The kicker is that these are all legitimate emails from companies weâve done business with in the past, and that we will, in all probability, continue to do business with in the future.
Just not at this breakneck holiday pace.
Itâs the perfect time for a little email pruning.
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Evaluate every email
I use my holiday inbox as an opportunity to evaluate every email I get.
Does it add value? Is it something I read, or routinely delete? Is it so much noise, or something worth keeping?
Every email. Every subscription. The holidays are a great time for a little email pruning.
Unsubscribe from those that add no value
Next time you get email from a business or email list that youâve subscribed to, ask yourself: do I get value from this email?
If itâs a list you intentionally subscribed to in the past, you can re-subscribe in the future should you find that you actually miss it. If itâs an email list of company youâve done business with or otherwise given your email address to, you can always return and do business with them by going to their web site.
Again, if youâre not paying attention to the email anyway, of what value is it to you? Why keep getting it? Unsubscribe. Â (âUnsubscribeâ links are almost always found at the very bottom of the email.)
Unsubscribe from those that add too much noise
I find thereâs a class of email subscriptions that I would like to continue, but I find that I just canât. Not because they donât add value â they do. Not because Iâm not interested â I am.
Itâs because Iâm not that interested.
I donât need daily reminders of all the interesting stuff that this company has. Yes, itâs cool, itâs awesome, itâs fun â but once a week would be plenty.
Daily? I just donât have the time to invest in that. Itâs too much of a distraction every time I open my email.
Unsubscribe. If I want, I can visit them on the web â on my schedule.
How many emails do you get that fall into the âtoo muchâ category? Would your time be better spent elsewhere? Unsubscribe.
Donât unsubscribe from spam
Now, I have one caution for you: never ever âunsubscribeâ from spam.
Spam is email you did not ask for. Spam is email from companies youâve never done business with.
Clicking on the âunsubscribeâ link on spam emails only confirms to the spammer that theyâve found a live person in their mass mailings, and it will likely get you more spam, not less.
On the flip side, never mark email that isnât spam as spam.
Email from companies you do business with typically isnât spam. Often, as you go through the purchase process, you give them permission to add you to their list (sometimes inadvertently, by failing to uncheck a checkbox). This is not considered spam. Unsubscribe instead.
Similarly, never mark email that you actually asked for as spam. For example, if you subscribe to my newsletter and later on you no longer want it, unsubscribe.
In both cases, marking legitimate email as spam can actually harm the business and its customers, because email providers may use your actions to begin filtering this legitimate email as spam for others, who may not think itâs spam at all.
Donât unsubscribe from emails that give you value
It should go without saying, but if youâre getting value from an email subscription, donât unsubscribe.
If the emails are things you look forward to, or file away for future reference, or just generally read and value, thatâs exactly what email mailing lists are for: putting value into your inbox.
Naturally, I hope you feel that way about The Ask Leo! Newsletter. :-) (But if you donât ⊠then yes, you should unsubscribe, using the link at the bottom of every message. Seriously, if youâre not getting value from my newsletter, I donât want to bug you.)
My criteria
Iâve been doing this for a few days, and have developed a little bit of a sense for what appears to be valuable to me.
Keepers:
- My friendsâ mailing lists. As you might expect, I have a few entrepreneurial friends, and I subscribe to their work both to show support and to give them feedback they might not hear from less invested readers.
- Email that I actually read. This falls into a couple of buckets: entertainment (like This is True, though that falls into the prior bucket as well), and business-related (a couple of CopyBloggerâs lists are good examples). If I find myself reading them immediately, or saving them to read later and then actually doing so, then itâs a clear keeper.
- Businesses I do repeat business with. Starbucks and Amazon contact me regularly, and thatâs OK.
- Most (though not all) non-profit organizations that I support.
Unsubscribe:
- Emails that are too frequent. I mentioned earlier a business that was emailing me daily with new and cool featured items. It hurt to unsubscribe, because they are indeed cool items ⊠but I only have so many hours in the day.
- Emails that I routinely discard. Thatâs a clue that I shouldnât be getting them in the first place. Unsubscribe.
Thatâs just me; your criteria may be different. What I recommend is that you think about what your criteria should be. Then, during this busy holiday season, when all of these email sources are sending you plenty of reminders, evaluate each, and start unsubscribing. Â In the midst of holiday chaos, hereâs one arena in which you can have complete control!
Subscribe to Ask Leo!
Iâd be remiss if, while talking about email subscriptions and unsubscribing from things, I didnât mention my own newsletter â The Ask Leo! Newsletter.
I believe that my newsletter adds value by including lots of information, solutions to problems you might be experiencing, tips for using your technology more effectively, and strategies for staying safe online.
Subscribe, and give it a try.
If you find that it doesnât add value, if you find youâre simply discarding it unopened each week, then unsubscribe. In fact, please unsubscribe. Like I said earlier, I donât want to bug you. :-)
Do this
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The biggest problem with unsubscribing is with institutions that ask you to reply to unsubscribe, rather than provide a link. I use different email aliases for each institution (including AskLeo) that are receive-only which are forwarded to my primary email account. Therefore if I I reply to unsubscribe it comes from my primary account, not the original alias, which is pointless!
Iâve not run into many of these any more. The ones that annoy me are the ones where you click a link and then you have to type your email address in again to confirm. Not only is that annoying (they know who they sent the email to, and thus they know who clicked the link), but I think itâs also against the CAN-SPAM legislation.
I sorta disagree with one thing you say in the article. I believe an email from any company Iâve done business with who sends email without explicitly haven received my permission is spam. I generally mark those as spam and then unsubscribe. By definition itâs spam as itâs unsolicited, so I do my tiny part in letting the world know by marking them as spam and in extreme cases flagging them as spammers on WOT. One notorious example is an (in)famous discount airline who constantly sends promotions and even third party ads. A lot of companies believe they have the right to spam you just because youâve bought something from them once.
According to the law in the US, at least, I believe they can send you email. But that same law says they must pay attention to the unsubscribe request. You may be doing others a disservice in marking those emails as spam (i.e. preventing people from getting email they want).
I donât believe many people want email from Spirit Airlines
I have a simple issue of unreasonable emails, they go to Spam, or Deleted items, I still use IE2K email and when Ella failed, I relied on Office 2000 and the Organize function. Works well. As long as you remember how to use it. MS makes nothing easy.
I disagree with your point that you should not unsubscribe from spam. I used to get a ton of them, so at one point I started to unsubscribe, knowing that they would now know my email address was valid. But, there was a significant drop off in the amount of spam. Now I rarely get any spam.
What you are unsubscribing from probably isnât full spam in the legal sense. Itâs most likely unwanted email from legitimate companies. Many companies consider it fair game to send promotions to anyone whoâs ever done business with them. Personally, Itâs can still be considered spam as it is unsolicited email, but still not spam according to the law.
I agree Mark. If the âunsubscribeâ link works then it is not really spam. Definitely use the unsubscribe button when it is not spam. Quite often people actually sign up for something, even double-opt in, then forget and turn around and call it spam. Not really fair to the legitimate businesses.
I keep tabs on some companies I have unsubscribed from. This has allowed me to identify one business I have bought from once (like 50 years ago), and which stills spams me once a year. Proposing to unsubscribe.
However, if you do, they still spam you one year later. Actually, they just want to know whether you were still alive and your address was valid.
Last time they did this, I paid attention to the message âacknowledgingâ unsubscription. It said : âSee you soonâ, which, in retrospect, is a particularly vicious way to say : âYouâve been had, sucker, weâll keep spamming you till you dieâ.
Needless to say, I donât plan to buy again from them â ever. But Iâm sure they think they are smart. So I wrote a rule under Outlook 2003 to bin their âunsubscriptionâ proposals as soon as they get in.
This is a major problem. The big email providers micosoft, msn, hotmail, gmail yahoo etc all insist that web developers include unsubscribe links in email or else you get blocked. So spammers win again the major email providers need to get their act together when asking for unsubscribe links to enable inbox deliveries. I use dmarc on my servers and that appears to work better than unsubscribe links
Itâs definitely good to do an end of year cleaning. I often use birthdays as an occasion to unfriend people on Facebook that I really donât know, like old school acquaintances I might have talked to once or twice in my life. It seems kind of mean, but when I get a birthday reminder and have to ask myself how I know this person, itâs time to rethink our FB âfriendshipâ
If you unsubscribe arenât you just verifying that you are a legitimate subscriber and open yourself to even more unwanted emails?
That depends. If itâs a legitimate company, then unsubscribing is safe. If itâs spam, then unsubscribing will bring more spam.
If you try to unsubscribe from spam: exactly. Thatâs why you should:
NEVER unsubscribe from spam
ONLY unsubscribe from things that you explicitly asked for, or have a business relationship with