Why I Unsubscribe? Reasons to dump unwanted emails

I’m sure we are all familiar with unwanted emails from variety of services. Every service we have ever subscribed to or provided email address to is sending marketing material, updates, newsletters, useless information, almost a “spam”.

I used to create a label and filter for some of this unwanted mail in my Gmail account. The rest received a Filter of going directly to Spam or a Trash folder.

When I asked around it turned out that a lot of people were dealing with the issue in the same way.

There was the point when I reached ridiculous level of useless information in my inbox and I decided it has to stop. I did take the time to actually navigate to the bottom of emails and click UNSUBSCRIBE button. Why did I do it?

I thought about it for a while and these are the reasons I came out with:

Filtering

Despite the fact that the unwanted email were labeled by filters and moved out of my inbox, I had to create new rules every some time because the old rule was invalid.

Wasting time

I kept on peeking into the labeled folders as they were indicating number of unread emails and I don’t like that. Sometimes, I found myself brainlessly browsing the Internet, triggered by following the link in the email.

Wasting space

I know that my Gmail account can easily take all my mail, but I felt a bit silly wasting all that space for meaningless communication.

Information loss

There were times when services were actually sending a very important information but I never got to read them as they got lost in my labeled folders along with all the other “spam”. When it happened few times I started to pay more attention to those folders and falling into habit of time wasting.

Waste of energy

This time I don’t mean my own energy. I actually mean electricity. Every mail that gets send cost energy. I know it’s tiny and I know it costs 0.000000001 of a British Pound, but multiply this by thousands of users and 365 days in the year. It felt ecologically wrong to carry with those emails.

If you were thinking about unsubscribing but never got a real good reason for it, perhaps you could borrow some of the reasons I just mentioned.

Greg