Crazy Cat Lady of Email

So apparently I have email issues.  Or specifically email *hoarding* issues. And I don’t mean a little bit.

I mean, I took an hour to clean my inbox last night…because I was looking for some interview questions I owe some people. After that hour? I still had 40k messages in my inbox. Of which 11k were unread. (That was down from 18k unread, btw. And probably about 60k in the inbox.)

And that doesn’t even count the ones actually filtered into specific folders. All those mailing lists and such .(Although I took a large step over the summer and switched to digest for most of them, so at least that little bit has cut down.)

The rest of it? Eh – a fair amount of spam that I guess I just never got around to deleting, but it’s more than that. There’s all the stupid stuff like ads from places I shop at. Notifications from Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. Every other freaking social network out there. Notifications from my gaming forum.  Notifications from every time someone leaves a reply on my blog. (Only I get those twice – once from Blogger and once from Echo.) All those emails I got when I was the webmaster for FF&P.

And it gets worse, because I have them on multiple machines. I’ve got pop accounts on different laptops as well, so I’ve got a lot of these messages in duplicate or triplicate. (Only one account actually pulls them off the server.) Also mostly undeleted. Half the time I do intend to delete the crap when it shows up, but then I get distracted with something else…and then a slew of new messages come in and it’s already too late.

I’m not sure why.

Maybe there’s that little “But what if I NEED it…5 years from now?” voice. Or maybe there’s that lonely part of me that likes to go back and reread some of those tweets or facebook messages and remember a different time.

I honestly have no idea. (But it’s fairly reflective of the homelife too. I’m a pack rat. Wouldn’t go so far as to say hoarder, but I definitely have trouble getting rid of things…though I’m working on that too.)

But anyway – I’ll probably take an hour a day the next few days to try to dig through the rest of it. I *did* find the messages I was looking for and put them into a specific folder, but if you’re expecting something from me (a blog post, a book, whatever) and you don’t hear back soon, feel free to…drop me an email. >_<