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This week, I decided to unsubscribe from (nearly) every maketing email list. I'm shocked at how many I was on. A few observations:

• In general most of the email marketing systems work pretty well and no one was especially onerous to get off of. Many, however, did make the unsubscribe process unnecessarily confusing. "If you want to unsubscribe, uncheck these three boxes, check the two odd boxes in the next section, and hold your nose while pushing submit."
• Also, I found that I was on multiple lists from the same organization and usually unsubscribing from one didn't unsubscribe me from the others. Organizations create new lists, copy you in from other lists, and then treat them as silos.

In all, I've probably unsubscribed from over 100 lists this week. I've been too long in the habit of just deleting them, even though I wasn't going to ever read them again. What brought this to my attention was setting up my iPhone to see my email accounts (IMAP). Once I started having to process email on a smaller, less productive interface, I felt the pain more accutely. Now, hopefully, I'll have a little less work to do.