Email? No, thank you!

When I got back to work last week after a two-week holiday, a mountain of emails awaited me. Well, 688, to be precise.

I am not bragging or trying to create any sense of email envy. In fact, I am sure that many of you receive more emails than I do.

But faced with this mountain, I decided to see exactly who these emails were from. This is what I discovered:

• 47 emails were from colleagues or Business Spotlight authors. Of course, my colleagues knew I was on holiday so they didn't write as often as they normally would have done.
  
• 18 were internal Spotlight Verlag emails.
• 15 emails came from the social networking sites Facebook, Xing and LinkedIn.
• 14 were personal emails from friends.
• 9 other emails were business-related in some way.
• 2 emails were from Business Spotlight readers.

That makes a total of 105 emails, just over 15 per cent of the mountain. So what about the rest? Well, the biggest groups of relevant emails were:

• 95 from news services, mainly from The Guardian/The Observer , which Business Spotlight subscribes to. 
• 93 emails from email lists that I have subscribed to. The highest number (49) was from BESIG, the organization for business teachers.

There were also 19 press releases that I would regard as relevant, as they dealt in some way with language learning for the world of work.

But that still leaves 367 emails, more than half of the total. So what were they? Spam, maybe? In fact, only two emails were hard-core spam, though neither related to sex. I guess Spotlight Verlag has good spam filters.

No, the biggest offender was 275 emails  — 40 per cent of the total — that were absolutely irrelevant press releases, covering everything from art museums to the latest computer printers. There were also 90 from uninteresting email lists, which I guess I signed up for at some point.

As I result, I spent an hour unsubscribing from every list I could and telling the PR people not to send me any more of their irrelevant messages. In total, I sent more than 100 emails.

The first signs indicate that this strategy is working. I am now getting on average only 10 irrelevant press releases a day, compared to 20 before. Let's see how long that lasts.