For the past several days, I have been absorbed with weeding the junk out of my email. I signed up for Hotmail decades ago – a free service, efficient in its simplicity – but when it metamorphosed into Outlook a few years back, suddenly I found myself bound by “the chain I forged in life.” Otherwise, certainly, I would have moved on to something more genial, if it exists, as I despise the changes they’ve made to the always preferable basic format.
As it stands, I’ve held on to the account for a good twenty years, the only one I’ve had since making the leap from AOL, in the antediluvian days of dial-up. In fact, the archived emails extend all the way back to my bookselling days. Later, when I began in journalism, I started to receive press releases by the truckload. Factor in the usual ads and notifications that are the legacy of any online transaction, and that’s quite the imposing horde.
Naturally, I let it all run wild, as I seldom deleted anything. Heaped atop the personal correspondence – an ever-expanding mass, to which I continue to contribute daily – that’s a staggering amount of content. If it had all been stored in filing cabinets, no doubt someone would have been crushed to death by now.
This is all preamble to the news that, the other day, I received a notice from Outlook, stating that I have exceeded the 15.00 GB storage space I am allotted, and that if I don’t get my act together and tidy it up ASAP, I will neither be able to send nor receive any more email. The accompanying diagram illustrated that I was 176 percent over the allowed amount.
When I mentioned this to a friend, as we spoke on the phone over the weekend – while I continued to multitask with my deletions – he was stunned. How the hell did I use up so much space? He deduced that it must be because of all the attachments associated with my work in radio and with the newspapers. To try to make more comprehensible the vastness of my transgression, he explained that I could fit 500 copies of “War and Peace” in 1 GB. As it stood at that moment, already well below the 176 percent I mentioned, somehow I had annexed enough memory that I would be able store 300 MILLION COPIES of Tolstoy’s magnum opus. At least that’s what I think he said. That’s an awful lot of Natasha Rostov.
So I have been engaged in an ongoing mission of search-and-destroy. Tower Records. Barnes & Noble. Berkshire Record Outlet. Facebook notifications. Amazon. Ebay. Advanced Book Exchange. The Criterion Collection. Petco. L.L. Bean. Harry & David. Paper Source. Performing arts groups, venues, and ticketing agencies. Political organizations. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday enticements. Wildlife and college donation requests. All are on the block.
In fact, so numerous are the emails that, even as I isolate them in my searches, there are only so many that can be loaded at once. It is time-consuming, certainly, and starting to get a little rough on the eyes, but it is also satisfying, in a way that any housecleaning is satisfying. I must say, it’s become something of an obsession. I am now a weed-whacking, deletion addict. In the past few days, I have gotten rid of 29,519 items.
This is why I am not writing about the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alfred Reed today. Apologies to all you band nerds. I simply find this to be that much more absorbing.
Thankfully, despite my flagrant disregard of storage limitations, it appears the flow of welcome email has not been staunched. But going forward, I will be much more vigilant about deleting, unsubscribing, and blocking. At present, I stand at 137 percent. That’s a dandy lion of weeding yet to be done.