I’m sorry, but I opened my gmail and there were 5400 messages and I got chest pains so I just deleted everything. If you sent me a nice email or an unhinged rant and I never responded, I now never will.
Personally, I blame you all for signing me up for so much damned spam and email lists. That jackass Jeff Greene from Florida accounts for about 35% of my inbox, and I know for sure I never signed up for it. I’m pulling for Crist because Meek doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell and Rubio is insane and ignorant.
But back to the email. It had to be done. I was dreading opening my gmail account. Although I’m a little sad I will not be able to take advantage of all those offers to lengthen my penis or earn millions with my new Kenyan friends.
CJ
If you would just wire me 2500 American dollars to facilitate the end of your spam troubles. . .
Allison W.
but what if publisher’s clearinghouse was trying to reach you?
Perry Como
Are you on Obama’s payroll now?
Dave C
Hmmm…I have never once in my life received penis enlargement or Nigerian scam spam in my gmail inbox. I think you may need to look at your security settings because gmail is pretty good about automatically filtering that stuff into the spam folder.
Uloborus
It’s cool, Mister J. I was all like ‘Dude, you are so right about the WATB, by the way I hate you.’ Or something like that. I don’t keep track.
LittlePig
I’m glad my gmail doesn’t have that volume. I don’t blame you a bit.
I get about 3000 emails / day on my SMTP account, but I grab those with Thunderbird and just nuke whatever doesn’t make it past the filters (usually about 98%, sad to say), which are OK-not-great in Thunderbird.
I don’t think Gmail has those kind of tools, but then I only get buy.com mail there anyhow.
TooManyJens
Good for you. I have occasionally fantasized about declaring email bankruptcy, but haven’t done it yet.
Dave C
Okay, my previous comment tripped the moderation filter for reasons that, in hindsight, are pretty obvious. Help!
xephyr
Well done John. I find it inspirational. Delete babee!
Kryptik
I think that’s why I avoid mailing blog folks directly when I want to bring up a story. I can only imagine the amount of spam and/or hate mail you guys get.
Trinity
You are my digital Steven Slater! Grab two beers and forgetaboutit.
Anya
Cole, you’re mixing up your African scammers. Nigerians offer millions, Kenyans steal American elections for native son with a fake Hawaiian birth certificate.
jhh
John—My sympathies. But I have two words for you: Custom Filters. I use these to sort, file, delete or send to spam my Gmall inbox. And to even turn my family’s msgs into SMS’s to my phone. You can give a secret safe word to Premium Members of Balloon Juice that allows their adoring messages of support, adulation, marriage offers and Paypal contributions to dodge the rapacious filters.
El Cid
But wait — I was just getting ready to start sending you my serialized novel about the trials and tribulations of a young TeaTard facing a Communist World!
Carnacki
What do you think of the Mike Oliverio-Bob McKinney race in your neck of the woods? Seen any commercials for it?
WereBear
@jhh: Yes, those filters are AWESOME.
After all these years, I had just sent you an email, too! But don’t worry about it, it was just me saying thanks for something :)
demo woman
John, I set up a dummy g-mail and I expect that you have done the same thing for political ads, and such. I still don’t get the offer to claim my million dollar inheritance from long ago Kenyan relatives and feel left out.
Kryptik
@Kryptik:
Case in point:
NY Transit Authority Yields on Anti-Mosque Ad After Lawsuit
It’s WSJ if only for them including the actual ad in the story. Seriously, one of the most vile ads ever perpetrated.
Sentient Puddle
Me, I just abuse the hell out of the multiple account features in Gmail. One address gets too bogged down in spam, I start up a new account and get everything to forward to it with new filters.
I could probably stand to streamline it. Like, have a master account that I tell nobody about and put all the filters there. This sounds like a new project for me to do later today…
BR
Ur doin it wrong.
With gmail you shouldn’t have those sorts of spam emails in your inbox…
roshan
There is nothing wrong with having a big dick and millions to go with it. I am forwarding you some sensible remedies for your unfortunate mishap.
Poopyman
You deleted all of those teaparty pleas for money to repel those liberal infiltrators!?!?!?!
I haz a sad.
Seanly
I hate to be a literalist, but if you had already deleted all the emails, then you can’t really apologize in advance…
Poopyman
BTW, if you’ve already deleted the emails I don’t think you are sending apologies in advance. I’ll check with my Nigerian grammarian and have her get in touch with you.
ETA: Curses!
Brachiator
Oh, crap. It means you didn’t get my offer to take that pesky iPad off your hands.
wes g
you might consider doing a “search” for any undesirables (like the spam they signed you up for) and then click “select all” then click “report spam”. that means all emails in your inbox, + any future emails will be directed to spam.
ex. search “potterybarn.com”, highlight all and “report spam”
i don’t know how similar all the spam emails were, but im sure some people (like me) may have sent you an email and were hoping you’d read it!
ps. my email was a good deal on stoves. now youll never get a good deal on stoves :(
Winston Smith
The bank offers usually come from Nigeria, but you said Kenya.
Freudian slip? Are you involved in the conspiracy to cover up Obama’s birth certificate?
Who are your Kenyan friends and what are they hiding?!
Joshua Norton
Dude. Take a little time and learn about the filtering options on gmail. I use it as my junk mail email address for those “iffy” websites that you just know are selling your info, so I get about 6000 emails every 3 or 4 days. Since I’ve been aggressively filtering my incoming mail, most of it goes directly to delete or spam. Makes life SO much easier.
lawnorder
You now will never read my 100 emails asking for more Tunch, Lily and Rosie pics.
The horror!
EddieInCA
I’m currently working in South Florida. Been here for about five months. Weird freaking place. It’s a cross between Georgia, NYC, and Los Angeles. You have the most in-bred, racist, redneck crackers intermingled with expat NYC Jews intermingled with more Cubans than Los Angeles has Mexicans.
I cannot get a handle on this place. Most of the people I know, mostly hardcore Democrats, are voting Crist as well – and for the reasons you stated.
Cliff
Also, Too:
you can mod your gmail address with .’s (dots) as gmail doesn’t see ’em, except for filters.
so set one email filter to jcole one to j.cole one to j.c.ole etc etc … and only give trusted dot patterns to people/sites you actually give a f’about.
edit: Also too: archive mail you want to save to get it outta your inbox. if everything is filtered correctly only stuff you want and stuff the filters cant fig out stays in the inbox, everything else should be shuffled off to appropriate folders automagicly.
Cliff
also, too: I just found out you can also do + addresses
Gmail also supports “plus-addressing” of e-mails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the form: [email protected] where extratext can be any string. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services.
Tone in DC
EddieInCA
I’m currently working in South Florida. Been here for about five months. Weird freaking place. It’s a cross between Georgia, NYC, and Los Angeles. You have the most in-bred, racist, redneck crackers intermingled with expat NYC Jews intermingled with more Cubans than Los Angeles has Mexicans.
I cannot get a handle on this place. Most of the people I know, mostly hardcore Democrats, are voting Crist as well – and for the reasons you stated.
**********************************************
Sounds a lot like northern Virginia.
Incertus (Brian)
I got 5 phone calls from Greene’s campaign yesterday. I finally answered the last one and told the poor dude on the other end that he should pass along the news that whatever slim chance there had been I would vote for Greene in the primary (none, really), the phone calls had made it vanish. He got the words “I apologize” out three times before I hung up.
Sentient Puddle
@Cliff: Alright, got some questions of how exactly these work because they sound like things I might want to abuse…
For the dots, does this mean that “j.cole”, “j.c.ole”, and “jcole” all get directed to the same inbox (before filters)? I always assumed that the dots were part of the address and required, but if not, that could be useful.
And for plus, does it essentially amount to an optional string in the address? For instance, “puddle+sentient @ gmail” goes to the same inbox as “puddle @ gmail”?
I’m hoping I got this all correct, because this stuff sounds awesome.
PTirebiter
As Jimmy Duggan once said, “hey, that’s good advice.”
They’re fast easy and free.
mnpundit
We’ll just send you the rants again.
Cliff
@Sentient Puddle:
dots: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8158
yes, any and all dot combos get sent to the same inbox, it’s up to you to use the filters
plus is handy for when you are signing up for something you suspect will be spammy.
ie, signing up for evil mail lists: [email protected] and [email protected] will both be sent to the address [email protected], and each then filtered further into its own folder – and if they change the address they send from it won’t kill your filters, cause the filters are based on the address You Gave Them.
see how its double filtered?
[email protected] can sign up for spam(and subfilter it with the plus), and they can still get nice mail from their friends at [email protected] in their inbox
Ella in New Mexico
My new status on Facebook today!!
Chuck Butcher
I’ve had the same email address for around 10 years and I actually pay for it. Yes there are all the free ones and my broad band comes with an account and I pay for one. This account has been politically active for all those years and people know how to get to me even if I don’t know them or their addresses have changed.
I don’t know how large the junk mail file is, it’s big and every day there are hundreds that go into it and dozens that get added. It’s a price to pay that makes sense in my case.
licensed to kill time
ha ha ha ha! John Cole activated the slide on his gmail. Swoosh!
No reply for you! /gmail nazi
JC
I have to agree with everyone above. If you are getting 6000 emails in your inbox, you have a TON of things you can do, to manage this.
Custom Filters is the key. You can setup a custom filter to go right to spam, or to go right to a “read later” label, or, if interested for posterity, right to a label based on that request.
But with some setup time, and a little bit of ongoing maintenance, there is no reason for you to have to deal with anything other than a clean Inbox, while keeping everything you want, or spamming/deleting everything you don’t want.
Here is a link to a Youtube How To, and there are a bunch of other ones that will show up on the right as well.
AB
We clearly have different priorities: reading about someone else’s GMail mindwipe damn near gave ME chest pains. I guess you must keep stuff you actually need to remember/care about somewhere else, but for me that would be like having a lobotomy.
Jebediah
Don’t worry about the lost p**is-lengthening opportunities. I understand that there is a handsome, young-looking genius doctor named Kevin Pezzi who can help you with that.
Patrick
And most of we Democrats in Florida are both pulling for and voting for Crist.