Ask HN: When did you lose control of your inbox?
Was it a certain year, a certain age, a certain job, a change in life situation?
I didn't.
Or rather I took back control. I have now 2 email addresses - one for humans, one for the rest.
And I systematically unsubscribe from every email I don't want to receive (gosh I miss Europe for that), I delete everything that I have no reason to keep, and I archive anything that needs to be kept.
It demands a lot of effort at the beginning. But now my inbox is useful again.
Is there an automated way of unsubscribing?
Unroll.me is owned by Rakuten, and they clearly state that they extract stats and trends from your transactional and commercial emails.
Set up an email for each subscription. E.g. yourname+nyt@gmail.com. Block anything coming without a + extension. When you want to unsubscribe, create a rule to delete any email from the specific address you set up for that subscription.
Not really - some webmail clients act like they have one but they almost never works.
The other way is when you create an account somewhere, first thing you have to do is to go in their privacy and / or notifications settings. Stop it at the source.
Year 2000. Ended in a support role (think SRE 20 years ago).
Whe had a shared email account for the whole support group.
We received about 100-150 emails daily from people and automates processes...
... And nobody was allowed to archive or move mails to folders.
Almost 20 years later I simply don't trust email for important stuff. If I have to email something important I want to talk with the person, too.
When they wrestled that mail-server from under my desk in my apartment.
(No they didn't; it's an imaginary future doomsday scenario).
When I stopped using a combined inbox for life and work.
When subscribed on different mailing lists...