The Junk File

Email is an essential part of my daily life.  One of the first things I do in the morning is check my email.  That used to take about five minutes.  Now it takes at least a half an hour.  First we have important emails.  These are ones you want to get and are in fact looking for.  In my case they include messages from relatives, bills, receipts for bills paid, notes from my children’s teachers, the status of something I’ve ordered online or appointment reminders for things like the dentist or doctor.  These are welcome messages.  Then we have a huge gray area of messages you don’t necessarily want but they don’t bother you particularly either.  These include emails from web sites you frequent like Amazon, Facebook, and about 15 stores my wife is on the mailing list for.  These messages only bother me when I receive clusters of them and have to sort through them (See Cyber Monday).  The rest of the time I can look and delete pretty quickly.  Then there is simply what I define as junk.  To be fair, my wife may have signed up for some of this junk but it just seems to clog my inbox.  We get allergy alerts, breaking local news (which happened the day before), about a million Victoria’s Secret ads (they’re always giving away free stuff.  I can’t use anything from that store but man, are the free gifts cool.  Their marketing department is full of evil geniuses.  The sheer volume of ads is just too much, though.)  I get emails about student loan reform, local colleges, coupons for everything from restaurants to nail salons, department stores we go to once a year and ones we never go to, children’s play lands, tourism and realtors trying to convince me to sell my house.  This all gets pretty annoying.  The messages come all day long and no matter how many I block, more pop up in their place.  I think it’s because I’ve had the same email for a long time.  The problem with changing it is it’s the one all my relatives know me under.  To try to tell everyone a new one would be difficult.  It’s part of the reason we still have our home phone line.  Everyone knows that number.   If we went to our cell phones, a lot of friends and relatives we rarely talk to would be left out.  When I want more peace and sanity I go over to my Rival Gates email where the spam is considerably less.  Even there I still get a few odds emails and in particular my Junk file always seems to have a letter from someone writing in broken English about how they want to become intimate and exchange pictures with me.  If that wasn’t strange enough I get the old, “You’re Paypal account is incomplete and we need some information to update it.”  Do people still fall for that scam?  I see one trick after another in that junk file.  It’s enough to not make you want to check your email.