OPINION
To subscribe or not to subscribe?
04-10-2002
by Ralph Averbuch
Have you noticed how e-mail has come to dominate our waking hours? If you are reading this I suspect you too are a victim -- a willing one, no doubt.
This was brought home to me recently when I got an e-mail from a friend telling me that he was sick and tired of receiving masses of junk mail in his company e-mail inbox. On closer investigation, it turned out that about half of it was, in fact, stuff he had originally signed up for, and just couldn't be bothered spending the time un-subscribing from.
Over the months and years this had built up into a truly gargantuan amount of stuff that he never actually got around to reading. So, in defence of the companies sending him information, it is not spam he's receiving but legitimately requested information that he's too lazy to tidy up.
I noticed this recently with my installation of Cloudmark's SpamNet, mentioned in a previous column. One of the properties of this great piece of spam-filtering software is that it bases its spam recognition on the accumulated advice of millions of other users of the software. It therefore requires a lot of people to mark an e-mail as spam before my own copy automatically drops it into the spam folder.
Ninety nine times out of a hundred it's spot on and catches just about all the spam I get. But very occasionally my Daily Dilbert cartoon (yes I signed up for it too) gets re-directed into the spam folder.
Now this immediately tells me that a lot of people are getting Dilbert, and like me, must have had to sign up for it in the first place. Yet, subsequently they've decided that they no longer wish to see it and have hit the spam button on SpamNet. Enough other users of the software have done the same ensuring that, unless I tell SpamNet otherwise, my Daily Dilbert disappears tarnished and banished to the spam folder!
Now this has got less to do with the excellent piece of software than it does with those that use it. It tells us that people just don't unsubscribe themselves, presumably because, like my friend, it's too much like hard work?
I'm partly guilty of the same offence myself. A few years ago, as an actively interested member of the digital classes, I signed up for the top daily tech, media and Internet stories and features from Moreover. This gets me at least five e-mails a day, each containing a lengthy list of up-to-the-minute items. The problem is, I spend most of my time deleting the mails, never having read them because I'm too busy, yet unwilling to unsubscribe just in case I want to check it out at some future point!
This is no criticism of Moreover, which offers an excellent news-gathering service on just about any topic you could imagine. You can find out more from their site at www.moreover.com.
But it leaves me with a serious case of bulginginboxitis. In a world of bits and bytes flowing at ever-increasing rates, a disproportionate amount of it seems to make it into my little corner of the Internet.
So a plea goes out to my fellow e-mail junkies. Rather than delete unwanted e-mail, if you signed up for it in the first place, make sure you unsubscribe if you don't want it any more. It'll reduce the amount of time you waste deleting stuff you've not got time to read, reduce the amount of time it takes to download the stuff you do want and, perhaps most importantly, ensure that you can have a life...
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