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by ghaff 500 days ago
>People don't really read or check emails because spam became a serious problem.

With the tabs in Gmail, very little leaks through to my primary inbox that isn't relatively immediately relevant (and not a lot of mail total). Often don't look at Promotions at all and maybe glance at Updates once a day or so.

Email is useful for me though, yes, a lot of my interaction with my circle of friends is over texts.

2 comments

The problem for me is not so much real spam, this gets filtered. The problem is the massive amount of work required to unsubscribe or clean up automated emails from apps and websites, both transactional and non-transactional.

I know way too many techy and non-techy people who have thousands of unread email messages from those apps.

A lot of people I know don't really answer to real email anymore, unless they know something is coming. It became just something you use to make accounts with.

Even corporate email is dying. 99% of my inbox is transactional emails from SaaS apps and spam from apps I forgot to delete. And 90% of the rest is spam from recruiters or people trying to sell me some product. Only 0.1% is legitimate.

Statistically, email is not for people anymore, period.

Experiences differ. I did go on unsubscribe jags from time to time at my last employer because I ended up on email lists from a lot of events.

But really, I get 5-10 emails a day now in my primary inbox and I don't really have many filters. I DO get a lot in Promotions and Updates, but most of the stuff in Promos I can safely ignore and I mostly keep my eye on Updates if I'm expecting something I might want to deal with there.

Email is still my primary channel for the most part.

Spam filters can be trained. Just mark anything you don't want and didn't explicitly sign up to as spam, "legitimate" sender or not. Problem solved.
If everyone in a city wants to go crap in some place, I'm not gonna be the one cleaning their shit. I'm just gonna stop coming there.

Email is just a public toilet. I'm not gonna work hard so I can pretend it's a five star restaurant.

I'm already doing my part by not making it worse.

There is still a lot of "spam" if you don't spend the effort creating filters or unsubscribing to the new notification list that companies like to make every few months. Hell, my inbox is covered in invoices, receipts, disclosures, required actions, ToS changes, etc., even though I've spent some time setting up filters for some of the common receipts.
Sounds like lots of transactional mail for services you signed up to with that mail. Sign up to less crap or use a different mail from the one you use to communicate with real people.
I used to use a separate email when I ordered things etc. Once Gmail tabs came in, I pretty much stopped doing so because it was too much trouble to monitor a second email address because I actually care about receipts, order tracking, etc. a lot of the time.