This spring I sat down with my laptop and a new show to binge watch, and started looking at my inbox. Every time I found a new update from some mailing list I'd find the unsubscribe link, then search by some keywords and bulk delete them (places that sent email receipts are a bit trickier that way, but it's doable). Maybe 90 seconds per mailing list. Tedious, hence the TV.

The most obvious mailing lists removed a significant fraction of all of my emails. The long tail was trouble. When I'd done all I could stand, I went event-driven. Some infrequent spam would show up and I'd deal with it then. Now I'm dealing with a couple a week.

Most of my email is still 'spam' that I haven't brought myself to unsubscribe from yet. I've been thinking about it a lot lately and I may be there.

But I'm already at the point where if someone is trying to get ahold of me by email it works again, and that wasn't true for quite a long time.