(Frivolous blog content, posted as part of a
daily posting streak I have openly
committed to; standard disclaimers apply)
Out of boredom and curiosity, I
graphed how many
emails colleges sent me, excluding the colleges I actually applied
to. I am being extremely polite and just calling them emails. I’ve
wanted to make this for a long time, but it wasn’t until I saw this
post
about an email experiment on
waxy.org/links that I understood
which tools I could use to quantify my emails. (And then I actually made
it and procrastinated posting it here for two months. If you look at my
GitHub page or activity you might have seen it already, though.
Oops.)
I don’t think the results were expected. Other than saying that, I
leave the interpretation up to the reader because I’m on a tight
blogging schedule. Cool? Cool.
Step-by-step instructions:
Note from 2019: My 2012 self wrote this. I don’t
remember writing it. This is the first time I have felt personally
attacked by a post I wrote seven years ago.
Why do so many people have these three- or four- or even five-digit
inbox unread counts? I become uncomfortable when I have more than about
five unread emails, or if there are twenty emails of whatever status in
my inbox — the rest get archived, of course. Out of sight, out of mind.
Whew. It’s hard for me to fathom how anybody can sleep knowing they have
such a scary number of unread emails waiting for them.
Why does the status of being unread matter, one might ask? There are
already so many ways to classify things in the typical inbox: stars or
labels or folders or flags or whatever your mail service may call them.
Well, the thing that makes the unread qualifier stand out is that it
already has meaning; you don’t need to assign it any. It means you
haven’t read it! Thank you, Captain Obvious.
If you know how to use email, there are no good reasons to ignore the
status. Is the email actually not important to the point where you won’t
even bother to read it? In that case, why is it even in your inbox? If
it’s spam, mark it as such; spam filters are pretty effective nowadays,
but only if you train them, and even if not it only takes one click to
get rid of it. If it’s some notification you don’t care about,
unsuscribe or fine-tune your subscription. As invasive as web services
are getting nowadays, I haven’t yet seen a legitimate one that doesn’t
provide a link to let you do one of these things, even if it’s concealed
in small gray text at the bottom of the email. Should you encounter a
notification that doesn’t have these links or doesn’t stop spawning evil
clones after you tell it to, don’t think twice; it is spam and should be
mercilessly filtered as such. And if you still have two hundred emails
left after all that, you should either rethink your values or start
reading them now.