At its worst, I had 100,000 unread e-mails unread in my main inbox. Nearly all of them are political donation e-mails, and goddammit, I totally regret ever donating to those campaigns, though I'm mad mostly because my side lost. But the donation e-mails haven't stopped. There was a time I could go through every single e-mail that I got each and every day. But once those donation e-mails hit my inbox, I couldn't. So I thought I could let it go for one day ... except one day became two, and then it became a week, then a month, and then 100,000 unread e-mails.
What finally forced my hand several months ago was that Yahoo! Mail said I was bumping up against my storage limit. Though theoretically I would eventually have to worry about the limit with all the non-political e-mails I still have in my inbox since Day One, it's all those fucking donation e-mails that have taken up all my storage space. So, with the proverbial gun cocked and aimed at my head, I finally had the excuse to say fuck it, I'll just delete e-mails without looking at them.
But how to do that? Going through individual e-mails to make sure they were political ones defeats the purpose of a mass delete, so I went with deleting by keyword. But which one? I wasn't feeling a sense of urgency. But I knew, deep down, that I wanted to just get under this limit as quickly as possible, so I just wanted to find one keyword, zap all the e-mails with that keyword even if some innocent and non-political ones get swept up, and be done with it.
I profess I didn't think too long and hard over the one word I decided to use -- "donate." It seemed to be the one word in every political e-mail I had. After all, the point of those e-mails is to ask for money. So I searched for "donate," clicked the all e-mails box, and deleted away. Yahoo! Mail gives you a box with a final warning. In this case, it told me that I was going to delete, say, 100 e-mails -- and then gives me the option of deleting, like, 10,000 more e-mails that also have the word "donate" somewhere in the body. And I'm all, OK! And Yahoo! Mail actually had to take a few minutes, but those 10,000 e-mails were gone ... and yet there were more even more e-mails in my inbox that had the keyword "donate" but weren't deleted yet. So I had to go through this cycle two or three more times before it apparently found and killed off all the e-mails with "donate."
Got to be honest: I'm happy. I was never going to go through the e-mails in the way my ideal self wanted to because I simply didn't have the time nor the inclination. This massive kill-off is untidy and inaccurate, but it quickly got me down below the limit. And I had bumped up against that limit a couple more times not too long after this first time, but I guess I had more e-mails with "donate," so zap! they went. Finally, I'm under, and hopefully for good (so long as I get rid of the political e-mails that will infect my inbox after I die). I know that I will be sentimental for e-mails that I really, really wanted to keep but unfortunately had "donate" somewhere in the body of that e-mail ... that is if and when I ever realize they're gone. But I finally dealt with too much e-mail in a way that, if I were telling the truth to myself, I really like and wanted to do.
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