You’ve Got Mail.
What I learned by tracking my email activity for 16 Months.
Some Context
Three years ago, I started feeling like the victim of a scam. Ironically enough, hundreds of articles, posts, and “tailored” notifications told me that I was not alone: Many others were already concerned about how their attention was being mined and had started taking actions to prevent it.
The word “Free” took a whole new meaning. A warning (a threat?) of the possibility that I was under watch as soon as I clicked my way through the terms and conditions pop up. The feeling that by clicking that button I was signing a blank check worth of attention hours to ads and all forms of content, out of which someone else was going to make money.
I took Facebook off my phone soon after and got a couple of hours of my life back. The new awkwardly long password and the two-factor-authentication (I know, what a genius.) put an additional barrier to log in on a desktop. I felt good, for a while.
Then there was Twitter. It was harder to take off the phone since, at that point, it was my primary source of professional content and a central point of contact with tech leaders. Long password and 2FA were put in place to keep me from checking in two devices.
Lists helped at first but I’m lazy and never got back to them. Before my obsession took me to a weird place I made peace with the 280 characters social network and came up with a strategy: every time I’d find myself outraged or engaged in meaningless/destructive arguments I’d unfollow the account that took me there.
Even when it came from a random follower reply. Just unfollow the account as a way to walk away from the topic.
Politicians, media pundits, former classmates, and colleagues started falling altogether from my timeline. After a month, going through twitter was a breeze. And I felt good again. For a while, again.
EMAILAYA
Email was harder because engagement is higher. Fear of missing out is a powerful force and my inbox has always been a never-ending source of coupon codes; special issues; limited editions and the like. Lucky me. I had never used most of them but, what if I need them later?
The image above shows how many emails I received in 16 months on my personal gmail account. I have another one, plus company email.
I knew I had to do something but I needed a system. I tried different services like Unroll.me but such bulk action left me with the FOMO and an additional email. Oh yes, and they sell data. Mindlessly clicking the unsubscribe button was futile as well since sooner than later I found myself signing up again to most of those services/brands. And It was getting worse.
Was I signing up for more stuff? time to kill a nice plot by throwing in different units in a second axis (yikes) but it’s the fastest way to show that wasn’t the case, as I came to understand:
Number of senders was more or less stable while number of emails varied. That spike between July and September 2017? Father’s day + Colombian Saint Valentine´s equivalent. November? Black Friday and holiday promotions. February 2018? Actual Saint Valentine’s day (It is expensive being in love in Colombia)
But what about that surge between March and May 2018? You got it:
GDPR madness took email overload to an unprecedented level. It even makes Black Friday look humble.
Good. Besides that, I have discovered seasonality.
Interestingly, the number of emails per unique sender had not increased in a significant way during the peaks. Instead, a lot of “dormant” accounts started emailing. (i.e. Those who were not writing because I hadn’t exhibit the behavior of a good lead, had to reach out for legal reasons). Hence, the small lift in senders at the moment of email surge.
The problem: Each GDPR email was a FOMO trigger. Of course I want you to still be able to send me emails! From the sender’s point of view it was a clear “Account is active, want to stay in the loop, hit it!”.
The result: 52% increase Year over Year in June (i.e. vs June 2017) and 45% in July. August, a typically more active month showed a 19% YoY increase.
A happy accident, a change and a plot twist.
While all of this was going on, I had grown tired of gmail’s app awful design (I’m not very fond of that mostly red look) and started using Spark. An email client for iOS that worked really well and had nice solid colors.
It advertises a “smart inbox” feature similar to that of inbox by google and polymail’s. And like those, it doesn’t work. It is supposed to sort your inbox so you achieve inbox zero. The problem is that when you have +16K unread emails you can spend months tapping the little check mark to dismiss in batches of three or four. That’s a lot of tapping and nobody wants an unread email from last year at the top of the inbox.
Still, Spark was not as annoying as Gmail or Inbox and was certainly not as expensive as Polymail, which is more suited for teams and collaboration than for a personal email account.
The problem came when spark stopped sending emails when I was connected to a WiFi network. It would only send emails with cellular data which was good for my carrier but not so much for my scan-self email-habit at work.
Head on to Product Hunt and start looking for a new email client. And then it happened. Enters Astro.
Beautiful looking app advertising A.I features (but which doesn’t nowadays?). Well, to my surprise Astro actually works. At a given moment Astrobot would pop up with an insight along the lines of “It seems like you don’t read Sender X’s emails. Want to unsubscribe or automatically archive these emails?”
And I did. Logical next step was running to the notebook with my research, start checking the distribution functions of different domains and writing to my new friend Astrobot: “Delete all emails from…and unsubscribe.
Done! 10.000 emails deleted. You will no longer receive emails from “X”.
I love you, Astro.
Astro’s only nemesis? LINKEDIN. When asked to unsubscribe the answer was “Too many results”!
But still, linkedin aside Astro was perfect. Anyway, about a month into my new found friendship, with the same sense of irony this quest began, I received an email.
I hate you, Slack (not really, guys!)
Clearly, I wasn’t the only one feeling the pain. Some putting their faith in a (very) long shot:
I guess another meaning of free is that it is too good to stay around for too long. But still, Astro did a good job. The selective unsubscribe during august/september lead to a 46% YoY decrease in received emails and -53% compared to the average of the past 8 months.
I am yet to decide which email client to use for good (currently Boomerang and Edison are the ones installed in my phone.) but I can scroll through my inbox faster and, since I was consciously unsubscribing, the sense of control translated into a substantial drop of FOMO.
