But in order to make it usable, I needed to clean it up. When we got back from our cruise last week, I had upwards of 135,000 unread emails. Mind you, they didn't all come in that week. They have been accumulating over the years. I'm not sure how many years exactly, but since before 2013, which is nine years ago.
It just got to be too much to keep up with it. All it took was one week away on vacation and I couldn't catch up. Spam coming in from everybody. When I place an order for anything online, I look for those boxes that default to a check mark so that I do not accidentally opt-in to their marketing emails. I resent having to unsubscribe from stuff I never subscribed to in the first place. Last week I wanted to place an order on etsy. In the end, I didn't buy it because shipping it to the US would have cost three times the price of the item. So I asked the seller how much it would be to ship it to a UK address. And even though "James" usually responds to inquiries within 2 business days, as far as I know he never responded to my question. But I did start getting email from etsy. And I had to unsubscribe. Back when we were running the inspection business, I would get a system-generated email everytime a client paid by credit card. I rarely opened those because I didn't need to. But 10 or more clients per day - most of them paying by credit card. And to make matters worse, I'd get one email when the card was authorized and another when the payment was processed. This is how I ended up with 135K unread emails and if we count the ones that were read but not deleted, I think we're in the neighborhood of 150K
My plan was to "select all" and hit the delete button - well maybe the archive button. What I found was that gmail will only do this in blocks of 50. I'd have to do it 3,000 times.
And so here we are. It's Friday and I've been doing this all day every day for a week. No gym, no pool, no reading - just deleting and archiving emails. I'm now down to 44,000 and I'm back to 2013. So I am making progress.
