Off topic from my usual but I haven’t been read­ing much lately thanks to work and I didn’t have noth­ing to dis­cuss. How­ever, I found a rather inter­est­ing arti­cle on The Wall Street Jour­nal that a online pal sends me when­ever there’s an inter­est­ing topic on authors, read­ers and such. I found it inter­est­ing that some peo­ple hoard email.

In my inbox right now there is 172 pieces of email and my spam eater gets the rest. I would love for it to be ZERO. I don’t care to have a full inbox left unread. In the arti­cle, the jour­nal­ist noted that some­one had 16,000 pieces of email. Holy shit.  Most of the 172 pieces of email is stuff that I need to read. Major­ity of it is sub­scrip­tions from var­i­ous sources and such. Look­ing over my Spam Killer sum­mary, I have received 8700 pieces of email with 3585 of it being des­ig­nated as spam.

That’s not even for the whole year.

I find it a chore to go through my email. Even going through stuff that I know I have to read. I just hate deal­ing with mail of any kind and I wish I got very lit­tle of it. And if you send me chain let­ters — I see red. It goes with­out say­ing that I delete them with­out read­ing. I espe­cially hate those emails that are sup­pos­edly “true sto­ries” and they ask you to “for­ward” them to fam­ily and friends. I hate those too. On that same note, I do love receiv­ing emails from friends but those only make up about 10% of my inbox.

So, I’m a deleter. I love to delete stuff. It’s a dis­ci­pline of sorts to read, file and delete email. You have to stay on it. I did have my inbox down to 25 unread emails. That was sweet for all of two days.  I’d unsub­scribed to the var­i­ous Yahoo groups and newslet­ters I’d joined over the years. Yep, that nar­rowed the field but not by much. I still get pro­mo­tional items from book­stores that I use online. I feel like delet­ing those too but I’m always look­ing for a good deal on books, so, I’m careful.

So, how many pieces of email do you have in your inbox?  Are you a hoarder or deleter? Do you like hav­ing a full inbox? How about an empty inbox? I much pre­fer a empty one.