Andy Mitchell from Radio Wave

Begging letters filling inbox

The biggest spring clean up of email inboxes is in full swing, with those who cluttered them up in the first place doing most of the spadework.

The new GDPR rules on who can share our data are causing quite a stir in the corporate world, with everyone we’ve seemingly had dealings within the past queuing up to beg us to stay in touch.

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These emails have ranged in tone from the complicated “cut and paste this message” approach, to the switched on companies who realised early on, the best way to curry favour with people you wanted to pester for trade was to make it as easy as possible for them to say yes “click this big red button to stay on the list”.

For those of us used to getting sent pointless rubbish through the email all the time, it’s been somewhat enlightening to see those you thought you’d banished to the unsubscribe list long ago, suddenly reappear like last week’s fish heads out of the kitchen pedal bin.

Journalists and media organisations up and down the country get tripe sent up from mainly London based PR types.

These range from the marginally useful, where someone’s actually taken the time to find out where Blackpool actually is, to the armies of West End PRs who fire out pro forma drivel with alarming regularity, from their modish parquet floored riverside agencies.

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Many of these we banished to the spam bin ages ago, yet here they are again, all pleading to be included in the brave new world of pointlessness.

“We have a story for Wednesday!” bleats one of them...

“We’ve got a client who wants to push a new brand of toilet cleaner and he’s local to you in Blackpool...... he’s in Birmingham”... and so it goes on.

The Junk file continues to be home to a growing number of this brain deadening junk, yet I’m sure I asked to be taken off their mailing list years ago.

Then I discovered many of these agencies use a central distribution centre. I realised the key to stopping the drivel was to unsubscribe from the distributor’s list. The inboxes now don’t get clogged up, so the important stuff can get through.

I wonder if it DID actually unsubscribe me?