Are emails killing your credibility with your users?

After salvaging my work inbox from clutter, I set out to get my personal gmail inbox in order. Only this time the challenge was bigger: with over 25,000 unread emails.

Over the past 10 years, my inbox had fallen into partial neglect and slow decay. With a lot of spam and newsletters flowing in, I missed to do a cleanup.  Though I have been picking up most personal conversations and notifications, given this high noise-to-signal ratio, I had been missing out on some. If you haven't heard back on an email you sent me long ago, you now know why!

When I started cleaning, I couldn't fathom what could possibly cause 25,000 emails over a few years. How much I wish that gmail offered a simple tool that showed a categorical breakup of top sender/type of email, with a simple visual like the one below, that I put together indicatively?

I was horrified to find that every digital interaction online had each produced a stream of 'newsletters'. You buy something on an ecommerce/travel site (Flipkart, Makemytrip...), they send you daily emails on anything that they sell. You install an Android app (Zomato, Tripadvisor...), they spam you. You register for a new service online (Stumbleupon, Flipboard...), they flood you with offers. You register for a conference or download articles, they notify about every event or file that they add. This included websites that I had not directly given my email address, as well.

This apart, there were the set of 'genuine' spam emails sent from dubious entities offering retirement benefits to those promising 'secret offshore funds'. But these were easier of the lot. Its straightforward to clear them and after a few times of classifying them as spam, the gmail spam filter takes over.

I took about 2 weeks to painstakingly clear the newsletters and unsubscribe to all of them. Companies have created this credibility crisis by wilfully pushing daily mailers to unsuspecting consumers, which is not too different from continuous cold-calling your prospects every single day. Most of them don't even bother to check email preferences when they sign you up. What's worse is that for some the unsubscribe process is not straightforward, or just doesn't work. You eventually have to mark these as spam to avoid having them show up, something that I didn't want to do in the first place. Few mailers sure include an 'unsubscribe' link in the email, but they are carefully buried deep inside that one needs to search (see highlight in image below)! 

Given a choice, I would love to hear back from most of the websites, but at a much lesser frequency AND on areas/categories of my interest. Surprisingly, even when you unsubscribe, most websites just have a binary option of 'subscribe/unsubscribe', and don't bother checking if they can retain users by bringing down frequency or categories of notification. There were a handful of professional sites like the McKinsey Quarterly that not only check preferences while you sign up for the first time, but also have helpful options to stay connected sans the clutter. I guess most users would find something like the below page relevant, appealing.. and honest.