Opting Out

When I was away from home in September for ten days I was greeted on my return by 143 e-mails that had accumulated in my on-line in-box…and this was only on my main-correspondence screen name. At least 120 of them were spam, of course, but when taking stock of the general mayhem (delete, delete, delete) I realized that a lot of them were my own fault. That is, I somehow got onto mailing lists I hadn’t intended to and only inadvertently allowed by sheer neglect on my part. I had either bought stuff on-line without reading the fine print or somehow thought it would be cool to be receive the proffered information. Big mistake.

This week I’ve been attempting to do something about it by methodically “unsubscribing” to these mailing lists. This is sometimes not easy but I’m going to persevere in this project no matter how long it takes.

It’s pretty amazing what you have to do sometimes to opt out. The worst thing is having to first actually log on to the e-mail so that you can then search the site to find the area, usually way down at the end (in tiny print), to actually start the process of unsubscribing. Once you do find it and click on it, the deed should be done, right? Dream on, Mcdumdum; it’s not that easy. There are some sites where that happens but mostly you have to prove who you are and sometimes it takes as much as ten business days for it to happen. And be prepared to be inundated in those ten days by the very sites you’ve unsubscribed to; I guess they are reserving the right to take ten more shots at you. Sometimes they send you an e-mail asking you to confirm that you really want, or meant, to unsubscribe. Sometimes you get sent to a site that’s closed or a page that’s not available. Sometimes you can only dump part of it. Try to unsubscribe to Amazon, for instance…they have, like, five different areas on which they have you as a potential customer and you have to do them one at a time as they contact you. What is really weird is that you know you are only writing to a machine by using your own machine and that all of the regrets and sorrows at your departure are expressed by machines.

I wouldn’t have minded the deluge of spam so much but, like so much advertising and marketing, it pushes the limits of one's patience. Disney shopping was probably the worst offender…at least once a day (sometimes more) I would have e-mail solicitations from them. Giving someone a mickey takes on a whole new meaning but with the same effect; a soporific response. So out with the old and not in with the new and I’ll try to pay more attention to begin with when I futz around on-line. That might save a lot of delete delete deletes in the future.