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Are you ready for Unsub Friday?

Spam is hell. And this time of year, spam is twice as hellish and twice as common. But why not turn that post-bird frown upside down? Declare Unsub Friday!

There I am at my computer, staring at my inbox. It sits there, right at the top of my overflowing list, staring at me.

“When the hell did I get on Aeropostale’s mailing list?”

Even if you rarely get that much spam email, from about now through Cyber Monday – and a good deal longer – you’re apt to get emails from all kinds of random stuff you never knew you signed up for. Half shit-faced and giving out your email address again, huh? It’ll cost you come Black Friday.

But why not make Black Friday – useless concept that it is in terms of sales – into something really useful: Unsub Friday!

Since every mailer you get is required by law to have a one-click unsubscribe link in it, this Friday and every day after it until Christmas is a beautiful opportunity to clean up your inbox for the coming year. Get rid of all that junk mail by just clicking Unsubscribe to everything that comes in… unless of course it’s the DFE Morning Briefing. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water…

By Tommy Belknap

Owner, developer, editor of DragonFlyEye.Net, Tom Belknap is also a freelance journalist for The 585 lifestyle magazine. He lives in the Rochester area with his wife and son.

2 replies on “Are you ready for Unsub Friday?”

Love it. I tend to do this about once a month anyway – usually when I’m mad at myself for poor productivity. It’s hard to stay unsubscribed though. If you ever buy something from New Egg, you’ll find that the “join our email lists” box is helpfully already checked for you. I don’t know how many times I’ve unsubscribed only to find I’ve inadvertently resubscribed to those sites. Then there’s Digg, Mashable, and Newser – I can’t start my day without them.

Good reminder… A while back I added a filter (in Gmail) which matches any message with ‘unsubscribe’ in the content, and add ‘Unsubscribe’ label to those messages. And then, occasionally (hopefully) view the messages with that label and review if I need to keep receiving the messages. So should be easy, but I still needed your reminder.

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