A Week of Email Newsletter Decluttering (Premium)

As part of my New Year decluttering efforts, I spent time each morning for the past week or so unsubscribing from email newsletters.

Surprise: This was a good use of my time.

I know. Many of you will read the following couple of sentences and ask why I didn’t just use an automated service like Unroll Me or the spam fighting functionality that’s built into my email service or client. Obviously, I’ve tried both approaches over time, and the former, in particular, is good to know about and use when you’re trying to get rid of some of the more pernicious email newsletters. Especially those to which you never even subscribed.

But I went through this for a reason: Like many of you, I have, in fact, explicitly signed up for various email newsletters over the years. Or did, at least, sign-up for legitimate services of all kinds, triggering implicit subscriptions. I am referring here to legitimate email newsletters, not to outright spam.

That said, spam takes many forms. And even legitimate email newsletters from high-quality or highly-rated sources can have the same impact on us over, over time, as spam. This stuff is digital clutter, plain and simple.

Even if you’re not familiar with the tenets of minimalism, you have almost certainly heard of the recent decluttering trend that was started by Marie Kondo. Called KonMari, the theory here is that you should evaluate your items one-by-one, determine whether each “sparks joy,” and then only keep those that do. When done correctly, you will have decluttered and organized your life and will be better off, mentally.

I decided to apply this thinking to my email, which has been a constant source of irritation and unease for over two decades.

Spam is easy to spot and remove. Google Inbox, like every other email service or client, provides comprehensive spam tools. But I am a bit leery of this automation, too. Almost every time I look at my junk mail folder—granted, not something I do very often—I find legitimate emails that have been misjudged by the cloud overlords. My worry is that I may mark one newsletter as junk and that it will automatically remove similar newsletters that I may actually want to keep.

Newsletters and other unwanted emails are a bit trickier. Here, again, there are efficiencies which we can avail ourselves: In Google Inbox, the web and mobile email client I use, it is perhaps too easy to dismiss a message you don’t want in your inbox anymore: Just click “Mark done” (or swipe in the mobile app) and it’s gone forever. That approach can help you hit “Zero Inbox” each day, yes. But it is organizational and temporary in nature. It is not true decluttering since those emails will simply keep arriving.

Anyway, like many of you, I receive—or, received—a ton of email newsletters. They come from every hotel chain I’ve ever visited, every airline I’ve ever flown, every entertainment service I’ve ever consumed, every travel-related anything I’ve ever blinked at more than twice. I’ve subscribed—or have been subscribed without my knowing—via multiple accounts that date back, in some cases, decades. Many of which are mindlessly forwarded along from services that still hold my long-dormant accounts.

And so I forced myself, each day, to acknowledge each of these emails. To really look at them, to judge them. But as is the case with any real-world decluttering, it pays to be aggressive. The only real victory here comes from lightening the load dramatically.

There are newsletters to which I subscribed for a reason: I absolutely do want to know about apartments in Paris, because you never know, I may hit the lottery (which I never play), and I may someday be able to buy one. But the thing is, I already have this service bookmarked in my browser—which is a much better place than my inbox or a service like Pocket for this kind of information—so I unsubscribed. I have similar relationships with other services, many of which are travel related. I’m a dreamer.

Saying goodbye was interesting on a number of levels.

The best—by which I mean, “the most consumer-friendly”—services provide an obvious unsubscribe link and no silliness: You click that and you’re out, no questions asked. Some do wonder you why you are leaving, and I always tell them why. And am always vaguely depressed that “I never subscribed to this newsletter” is one of the choices. No one should ever be subscribed to anything without an explicit opt-in verification sent via email first. But we all know this happens regardless.

The next step down from there are the newsletters that try to hide the unsubscribe link by coloring it the same as the surrounding non-link text. Or the newsletters that send you to a page in which you are expected to enter your email address first; this bothers me because, again, I have multiple accounts, so I need to go back to my inbox and see which account they are using. (In some cases—I’m an idiot, yes—I was subscribed to the same newsletters multiple times, using multiple email accounts.) I also enjoy the services that tell me that unsubscribing may take some number of days—16, 21, whatever—because, you know, it’s not electronic or something.

And then we get into the problematic areas. Which are especially problematic because these are from legitimate international corporations that should know better.

First up is Iberia, the airline based in Spain. Its email newsletter offers no unsubscribe link at all. Instead, it notes the following:

“If you do not want to receive customized promos in the future, please send a message from the receiving account of this communication to our mailbox [email protected] or access your Personal Area, My Profile, Subscriptions to update the information in your Iberia.com profile.” To be clear, none of those locations are linked. So I emailed that address—using the correct account; I had to check first—and visited Iberia’s website.

Surprise: To sign-in to the website and visit the location they describe, you need to know your … Iberia Plus Number and PIN? What?. There is no way to input your email address and have them look up this information or assign a new password. In other words, this thing is designed for you to fail.

The other terrible one is the Marriott hotel chain. I have tried multiple times to unsubscribe from their newsletters multiple times, but they redirect you to a website that is not clear at all: You can subscribe/unsubscribe from six different email newsletters, but it’s not clear what checking or unchecking each box does. I’ve tried it both ways. Neither works.

No worries. As the Marriott emails note, I can always unsubscribe by writing to Marriott Rewards at 910 West Legacy Center Way, Suite 100, Midvale, UT 84047 USA. Just in case the web stuff isn’t tedious enough. Anyway, there are worse things in life than having to mark email messages from Iberia and Marriott as spam.

And more to the point, I feel that it was useful and instructive—and healthy, even—to manually confront these email newsletters. To judge them and then unsubscribe from most of them. To watch their numbers dwindle day by day. Yes, I’ll be dealing with these things for weeks or even months to come, but in vastly reduced numbers. Overall, I’ve done a good thing, I think.