Deleting Emails

Since it's the end of the year and I want to fulfill my 35 post annual quota to this blog, I'm likely going to be posting daily until the New Year. 

Recently I got a notice from Google saying that I've used up 72% of the space alotted to my free account. Looking into it, this is divided between my Drive, Photos, Gmail, and Other. Since then, I've lowered it to 64% just by deleting emails.

This isn't so disturbing. I've had the same address since I was a teenager, so even if I neglected to react to the issue entirely, I should still have a number of years before I have to worry about this. Still, it's recently become a project of mine to see if I can lower it to less than 50%

Gmail has an automatic system filtering messages into categories. Much of the useless content appears to be stored between Social, Updates, and Promotions. Because it defaults to showing me my base Inbox and there is precious little of interest in these other sections, it's been pretty easy to neglect.

At first I just moved through them in chronological order, selecting one-by-one which emails I wanted to delete. I'm a bit of a hoarder, so I did want to retain anything with a semblance of sentimental value. But I noticed that some sources sent very reliably unnoteable messages. So by searching these, I've been able to delete in clusters of 50 at a time. I'll describe some of these here. 

Pizza Nova: I used to go here for a slice now and again for the short period that I was enrolled at University of Waterloo. I subscribed to their newsletter in return for access to their WiFi. This was a bit more critical back when Data was more expensive.

It turns out that if you hit the "Unsubscribe" button provided by Gmail, it  doesn't actually complete the command. Instead, it sends a request on your behalf to the site in question. Pizza Nova has not been complient with this, so even though I was able to delete a large bank of messages, I continue to get a steady stream of them.

Twitter:  I created an account on this platform back when it was the rising star of social media, when it was attempting to be a viable alternative to Facebook. This place was always the worst, even before Musk got his hooks in it. I remember thinking that it was like Facebook, except restricted to just being the status update function. This meant that there was no opportunity to add nuance to discussion or commentary, forcing everything to be reduced to pithy one-liners. I noticed that it brought out the worst in me, causing my more intrusive thoughts to flow to the screen. 

I was disturbed that people paid more attention to my account there than to my blogs. I'm not sure if that was a more realistic expectation at that time, but it certainly isn't now. 

I blocked my account and it has been left sitting vacant since my teenage years. I've only logged in to vote on a poll on the Pokemon Go account. 

Of course, Twitter has since been bought by Elon Musk and semi-rebranded to X, somehow mutating into something even worse. After the takeover, it was announced that all inactive accounts would be deleted. This was the one thing I was grateful to Musk for, but I keep getting emails saying that someone is trying to hack my account. So either those are a product of a phishing scam, or there wasn't any follow through. I haven't bothered to look into it.

At one point, Twitter was sending out individual emails everytime someone that you were subscribed to Tweeted. I deleted them all.

FaceBook: I was a little more discerning with this one. I deleted everything that wasn't targeted to me. This means that I kept all the notices of messages and comments related to my account. I probably don't need all of those, but there's still so much to get rid of that I wanted to see if I could lower my storage beneath 50% while only getting rid of things fully detatched from myself.

I made an exception for some messages from the Social Work group where they were talking about a classmate that had passed tragically young. I kept those.

Plenty of Fish and OKCupid: These are the two dating sites I used back in college. I remember thinking that the women at Plenty of Fish were boring compared to those that frequented OKCupid. They would totally lean on you to maintain conversation and only respond in single sentences that were difficult to build off. This is retrospectively funny because Lee-Anne has informed me that, oblivious to myself, this was actually a Christian dating site. So my criticisms became more targeted.

I don't know the fate of either of these platforms. Nowadays I hear about Tinder, Bumbl, and... Maybe those are the only two I can name. Obviously these systems have no use to me now. 

Qora: This is a question-and-answer site akin to Yahoo Answers or a worse version of Reddit.  It's kind of difficult to discern if the place is active, or if it's mostly haunted by AI. Like Pizza Nova, despite having very little impact on my life, it sends a disproportionately high number of emails and has made it difficult to unsubscribe.

LinkedIn: This place is pretty bad for sending unnecessary emails. I did however get an article suggestion from them that caught my eye. It was called "Is AI The Worst Mistake In Human History?" In fact, the link is still active. If you're interested, here it is: 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-worst-mistake-human-history-john-battelle?trk=eml-b2_content_ecosystem_digest-hero-14-null&midToken=AQHyOMv0mXNbGQ&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=3XpAjxR-ax2s41 

It's easy to think of this technology as only making an impact from the year 2022 onward, but this was written in 2016.

The title references a quote from Stephen Hawking, in which he said that AI would be the last human invention. In the article, it frames Google and Facebook as these evil mega-corporations that have been hoarding the technology from the common person. In contrast, it speaks to an up-and-coming group called OpenAI, comprised of individuals such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who want to open it up to the world.

This is an interesting perspective in reflection, since now we know now that OpenAI would release ChatGPT, the forerunning system that would force Google and Facebook (actually Alphabet and Meta) to open their technology to the public in response. Yes, in a sense this has empowered the common person, but it has also created a ton of opportunity to scrape information from people, it has enabled and almost necessitated widescale plagiarism in schools, acted as a tool for the spread of propaganda, eroded career paths, and has created deep environmental concerns due to the amount of water needed for their cooling systems. If I'm being charitable, the best you can say about it is that it's been a double-edged sword.