Though I was expecting to see fewer bulk messages today due to last week’s efforts, I was surprised to find more messages in the inbox than there were bulk messages. I did a double-take and thought that my filters had gone awry again, but I realized that the time I put in last week really did pay off. I’ve had bulk messages in the triple-digits nearly every week for the past 4 months, so you could say I am happy with the return on investment with bulk messages in the low double-digits today.

Interestingly, bulk message processing this week took practically the same amount of time as it has in previous weeks despite having 75% fewer messages. Though some of this time used to sift through messages that required further processing (e.g. unsubscriptions), today’s time may indicate that there are aspects of processing these messages that require a certain amount of time no matter what. For example, simply clicking the “select all messages” checkbox takes the same amount of time whether you’re selecting 200 messages or just 20. The messages per minute rate may suffer as a result, but in the end, less email is less email.

Bolstered by the stellar results from last week’s unsubscription melee, most of this week’s bulk messages were flagged for unsubscription. Double-digits is nice, but as I said last week, bulk messages in the single-digits would be positively dreamy.

As a result of the additional unsubscription tasks this week, total message processing time jumped back up to over 15 minutes today, just one week after coming in at 10 minutes. If you want to get technical though, I didn’t truly take only 10 minutes last week because I spent over an hour unsubscribing from marketing emails later the same day.

With so few bulk messages to wade though this week, it has become apparent that there are some rogue senders out there masquerading as legitimate businesses. For example, despite unsubscribing from MyPublisher’s (a photo book printing service) marketing messages last week (and several times in the past as well), I continued to receive promotional emails from them this week. As a result, I am now considering them spammers and am reporting them as such to Gmail. I have attempted to unsubscribe from their emails one last time today, and will simply create an auto-delete filter if I continue to receive messages from them in the future.

So, do I miss the deluge of marketing messages? Honestly, I do miss them a tiny bit as I no longer know about sales that could benefit me. Now, instead of depending on emails, I’ll need to remember to check with different vendors when I’m looking to buy something to see if their current sales will offer any savings. For the most part though, I do not miss those messages at all. It’s a weight off my back for sure.

Today’s Stats

• Checked email: 1 time
• Time: 09:59
• Total messages: 137
  • Inbox: 41
  • Bulk: 33
  • Important: 0
• Management: 22
  • Incorrect Smart Label: 1
  • Unsubscribe: 19
  • Update filtering: 2
  • Spam: 0
• Time per Message
  • Inbox: 05:14 (7.8 messages/minute)
  • Bulk: 03:06 (10.6 messages/minute)
  • Management (filters, etc.): 10:11
  • Total: 18:31
  • Average: 7.4 messages/minute