deluge of electronic mail

I'm supposed to be studying for my exams. Really though, I am. But seeing my Y!mailbox shooting up to 90% full, I knew I should at least delete a few thousand of the mail I left lying around over the years. Yes... YEARS...

I have had that particular address for around 9 years. Ever since I was in grade 5. Yep. The e-mail address was actually assigned by my computer teacher before. We had a format actually, firstname_lastname@yahoo.com. I really didn't mind before. But I thought of getting a new one when I saw unusual addresses like @domain.com. I did get a new one though. This time, with gmail. Nothing new. Just changed the underscore to a period. Why? Well, for formalities I suppose. I have a habit of going to symposiums you see and companies love asking you for your address. It wouldn't be polite to write there "ithinkyourcompanyiscrap@yahoo.com" right? Besides. It is useful at times. Even if I forget to sign it with my name at times, they still figure out who I am.

But that is supposedly the convenience of e-mail right? But as with those ads that come in the mail (here in the Philippines, one common one in fact is school advertisements), there is of course, an online version for this. Its not the food, its SPAM.

Spam comes in a lot of forms. I bet you probably are familiar with most by now. Ads, chain-letters, unintelligible subjects (usually these are foreign but unrecognizable by the system), and miss-sent emails (yeah right). But with the popularity of on-line novelty sites, there is still a spam variation which encompasses all I mentioned above, albeit at a different magnitude. Yep. It carries the same name as in nature, the all popular FLOOD.

Ever since the days of the old friendster, the flood due to social networks was there. It may have been even before that time but friendster happened to be the first one I joined (or was it?). The bulletin board had oh... lets see... five or ten pages at least of the same post over and over again. Well, I saw this as a personal cry for attention. But the more they do it, the less I look. Heck, I'm even annoyed when I accidentally click post twice.

Multiply, is a bit worse. The floods ante up when you join groups. And did I mention the deluge is increased EXPONENTIALLY when you join groups? Hehehe... Not that I am against it, in fact I am a member of I think around 5 or more groups in multiply. And that is the reason why I have around 10000 more e-mails to sift through (not a typo). Some good mail is in the flood. Thats true. Some are inspiring photoshoots, some messages that could make your day. But of course, there are the for sale subjects, then again, I am not completely against that either. If I was in your shoes, I probably would do the same. Who can say no to free advertising? By the way, I saw some interesting accessories for my camera in an email. Just saving up the money to actually buy.

To those of you who face the same problem I had (I still do actually). I offer a few tips to prevent e-mail deluging in your box.

Tip #1: Use filters: Yahoomail has 15 filters for the free account. You can set it to identify for example, all mail with "for sale" in the subject and place it in the trash or a folder marked "For Sale". At least its easy to delete when you are not interested.

Tip #2: Consider using daily digest: If the group you joined doesn't send email attachments in their posts, you could opt to use this to have only one e-mail sent to you per day. A caveat though is that attachments aren't sent this way so tough luck if you miss an attachment you need.

Tip #3: Delete, delete, delete: Don't delay deleting unnecessary mail. Or at least place them in folders so they don't confuse you too much. Don't send them all to a folder marked "Old Mail" either unless its an archive folder since it can still and WILL still confuse you.

So much for spam. I got rid of about 5000 messages in a day or two. But have to study again. They don't call 'em finals for nothing. It really feels final.