Email Free May

 I have hopes that it will become a large trend, like Dry January, but I fear it will just be me.

I have to use my work email, of course, but I have almost no personal email coming to my work email. 

So my plan is to stay off my personal email altogether for the month of May.  For me, it is a matter of breaking compulsive habits that do not lend themselves to improving my life in any way. When I am working, I tend to glance at my email on the web browser, more often than I want to admit here.  It's an endless round of work email, the New York Times website, the Atlantic website, personal email, and then back to see if any more work email has come in.

My family either writes actual letters to me or calls the house, so most of the personal email simply is not personal.  There are two categories of messages in my email that particularly bother me:

1. Services I use that just assume it is acceptable to email me reminders and information. Our veterinarian, for example, got my email address to send me a quote for a surgery for our dogs.  That's fine, but now there are endless reminders of upcoming appointments and notices when the business will be closed.  They used to send one postcard through the mail when it was time for an annual checkup for our dog or one of our two cats. Now it has become a constant email bombardment.  The same thing happened when our city's Animal Control stopped sending out annual bills for license fees and turned it over to Docupet, a national organization.  It's not that I don't appreciate one reminder.  Endless reminders become simply spam, (and I do send them to the spam filter, which then makes me wonder if I'm missing something, so I check the spam).

2. Endless updates about orders I place online.  We've received your order. We've shipped your order. Your shipment is in your city. Your shipment is now in your neighborhood. We're sorry, we seem to have misplaced your shipment at the last moment.  I really don't care. I was surprised you could not opt out of email notices regarding order status at Amazon, for example. There should always be an opt-out.

I've created a script that dumps all email messages to me from contacts that are not in my address book and dumps them in the trash and marks them as read.  They're automatically deleted in thirty days. And of course, I had to check the trash every day to make sure I had added everyone I wanted to hear from to my address book.  Were the Urban Adventure League emails getting through? Yes they were.

So, for now, I'm declaring May the international Email Free Month.  I'm looking forward to June, when I can peek into my inbox and see how well my filter has been working.