I admitted defeat earlier today. The Spam load on my mailbox was just too big, even with several layers of anti-spam stuff on top of it. (And of course, I still had the occasional real message make it to my Spam folder, so I was hesitant to ramp that up even further.) It made my actual inbox pretty useless, and just annoyed me and made me think of looking at my email as a chore.

So anyway, as of this morning, I added a rule to automatically move any incoming message that was not from someone in my address book into a separate folder. A separate folder that I’ll check occasionally, and probably more often than my spam folder, but probably not every day. We shall see.

I considered adding an auto-reply sort of thing to emails that got filtered this way, with a “Sorry, you got filtered, but reply with BLAH BLAH BLAH to bypass the filter if you are a real human being.” but for the time being I haven’t done that. Those can be kind of annoying from the other end. I know that. If I discover (which is very likely) that I can’t empty the “Not In Address Book” folder at least once a week looking for real people who get stuck in there, then I may add something like that anyway.

I’m also aggressively unsubscribing from stuff. If you are a company I do business with, I’m going to whitelist you for getting order confirms and stuff like that, but I don’t want your marketing email. Sorry.

I’m also going to start aggressively “fixing” my address book, since it is a mess from years of bad synchronization between devices and other stuff. Well, as aggressively as I can without actually spending much time on it. :-)

Anyway, maybe this means that when people send me personal emails, I’ll actually notice and respond in a timely fashion rather than months or years later.