Simplification

I am tired of my email.

Over the last ten years I have subscribed to many, many mailing lists. I have procmail filters for about 35 of the most active. You know how many of these 35 mailing lists I actively read?

None. Zero. My subscriptions exist to annoy SpamAssassin, add load to mail servers, and consume my disk space. I could just search their indexes online if I ever needed anything from them. I get all my news via RSS now.

So I’m done with them. Gone. 35 mailing lists, unsubscribed. Bye. Adios. Seeya.

Over the last ten years my coworkers and customers have subscribed me to many, many mailing lists, because I’m their sysadmin. “Please don’t add me to your list, just email me when you need things,” I plead. “Oh, no, we want you on the list so you know what’s going on,” they reply. They don’t understand that every email I get means another email to read, to delete, to process. They order me to stay on the list regardless. I build a filter. Nobody wins.

I am breaking the stalemate. One of the benefits of being our list server sysadmin is being able to modify my own subscriptions. I just removed myself from 23 lists. Some of these lists haven’t seen a legitimate message in years.

58 lists gone. 75 procmail rules gone. And I’ve decided that anybody who adds me to a list I don’t belong on gets billed two hours a week from now on for robbing at least that much of my productivity.

Next stop is automated email. I hate automated email. I don’t want to get any email from a system unless it needs attention. People don’t understand that. They write scripts to mail out their systems’ number of registered users every night. They send vast amounts of email saying “everything is okay.” We own million dollar monitoring systems. Tell those systems everything is okay; I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want any email I can’t act on. I don’t want any email that doesn’t move me forward as a person.

So I’ve deleted my mail filters for automated email. Everything I get will flood into my inbox. And everything will be scrutinized.

I’m done with my email and my new, hardcore default setting is that I don’t want to see a single new message ever again.