Taming my spam box

It seems that once a year I get fed up with my bulging junk mail folder and begin deleting hundreds of political newsletters. During spring cleaning, I go on an extreme culling binge. If organizations ask me for money instead of offering a petition to sign, I give them the proverbial axe. 

In order to tame my Gmail inbox, I send Zoom events, newsletters, rewards, and political action items to my junk mail folder. It also means those pesky emails load in plain text, sans imagery. I have issues with flashing graphics, too much color on a page (especially red and yellow) interferes with my reading comprehension—which makes me angst ridden. And, more importantly, anything in the spam folder is a one-click forever delete button away instead of the usual three clicks to banish it from the trash. 

When I am on the unsubscriber warpath, very few sites escape my delete finger.  I don’t mind when reputable political websites send me petitions, as I spend considerable time each morning signing them as my standalone civic duty, but I get irritated when organizations attempt to either shame, or browbeat me, use insulting infantile, or alarmist verbiage (DCCC), or aggressively seek contributions. I am also not fond of surveys either. It seems like it’s another bogus attempt at drumming up money for their coffers.

In that case, very few political websites get a free pass. Most California politicians, also Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sauders, and Robert Reich, and most progressive websites such as Daily Kos, WinWithoutWar, MoveOn, Social Security, Medicare for All, and a few environmental websites—all get to stay and play.

I think some political organizations exist solely to pad their own coffers, rather than actually offering successful progressive political acts with those petitions. It’s a racket. The thing is, once you sign a petition, they often pass your email address onto the next political entity, and so on, like a bad virus. I don’t worry about losing touch, as the deleted political action websites eventually find their way back to my junk mail box.

I swear some of those sites look legitimate, but I have to wonder why I get an influx of weird spam email after signing some of those petitions—as if my address was intercepted and held hostage in a Soviet silo along the way. The past few days I’ve been unsubscribing to nearly every entity that has asked for money, thus taming my spam inbox. Blessed quietude. At least for a while. But then it will begin all over again in a few months.