When your inbox overwhelms you

In the play Octet, recently staged by Raven Theatre at the Goodman, the characters lament their internet addictions, including compulsive gaming, conspiracy mongering, pornography, and doomscrolling.

My problem wasn’t any of those. It was simply being overwhelmed by the volume of email.

Every morning I was spending an inordinate amount of time deleting emails I didn’t even open. By the afternoon there were scads more. 

I’m not unusual. You may get more unwanted email than I was getting. 

My sister says she doesn’t mind deleting unwanted emails. The IT person at my former job said the same. That wasn’t working for me. Opening an inbox and seeing a long lineup of messages made me anxious.

My issue wasn’t spam, unless you consider spam anything you don’t want. Legitimate senders had me on routine mailing lists that I wanted off of. Rather than marking them as spam, I went into newsletters and promotional emails and clicked unsubscribe. 

In the last few weeks I’ve unsubscribed from Politico, the Alzheimer’s Association, Petco, some Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times newsletters, the New York Times, Heather Cox Richardson, The Atlantic, Goodreads, USPS Informed Delivery, 1440 Daily Digest, Nextdoor, Budget, Lyft, Home Depot, Target, LinkedIn, AARP, PAWS, Advocate Healthcare, Friends of the [Cook County] Forest Preserves, HuffPost, Zulily, Udemy, Expedia, Thumbtack, the Auditorium Theatre, Arts & Letters Daily, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Flip Side, The Guardian, Chipotle, Idealist, AP, Roosevelt University, Silver Sneakers, BuzzFeed, the University of Illinois Alumni Association, Consumer Reports, Amtrak, the University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the League of Women Voters of Illinois, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Last Pass, the National Public Housing Museum, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Geni, Broadway in Chicago, eBay, Idealist, Kayak, Leaders We Deserve, Team Jayapal, the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, City Lit Theater, Josh Shapiro for Pennsylvania, Oliver’s restaurant, Labcorp, Country Financial, Kamala Harris, TruHearing, PetPlace, Charity Navigator, 7-Eleven, FedEx, and Wellspring Meds.

I hesitated about getting off lists that send discount codes and coupons, like Budget, fearing I’d miss out on a deal. I found out that Budget’s discounts are no different from those AARP membership already offers. 

How did I get on so many lists? I subscribed to most of the news ones and welcomed them until they became too much.  Retailers got my email address when I bought from them. Cultural spaces got my email when I visited them. Organizations have the email addresses of their members, and some, like AARP, have many different newsletters. Democrats are notorious for sharing mailing lists, possibly explaining how my email was known by Josh Shapiro for Pennsylvania and Team [Pramila] Jayapal. 

Since the great majority of the senders are legitimate, they honored my unsubscribe request. In some cases, however, it took more than one click. Udemy, an online education site, required signing in to get a code to unsubscribe. Some places have multiple lists, and you’re required to check “not interested” for each of them. 

You can find advice to set up “rules” that filter your incoming email into designated folders. My inboxes now seem manageable, however, so I’m not doing more — except unsubscribing immediately when an unwanted message arrives. Now I’m also more likely to mark something as spam, especially if I didn’t subscribe and would never want to (The Huddle fantasy football?). 

In case you’re curious, I did not unsubscribe from financial account notifications, my church, Block Club, the Tribune and Sun-Times daily editions, Public Square, WTTW, WBEZ, NPR, PBS, Eric Zorn’s Picayune Sentinel, Goodman and Steppenwolf Theatres (where I usher), the Dearborn Express, the Newberry Library, the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Park District, Rush University Medical Center (my doctors), Chicago on the Cheap, and Lexulous (the site where I play Scrabble). 

I realize that this blog adds to your email burden, so if you feel you no longer want to get it, you can tell me. I will understand.