Messages 14, new 0

That's what my primary Yahoo personal inbox told me today. Yesterday it has 3,000+ messages, of which 2,000+ are new. There's no mistyping, from thousands down to 14.

I had this account for a long time, and got invited by Google to Gmail at the first wave promotions. I turned it down as usual because you don't change phone numbers when someone invites you to. Then I regret about not having the 1G storage, and that having Gmail is like being somebody. There are too many spams that I have been struggling with the storage limits in Yahoo from time to time. But that's a good thing. When the Yahoo storage goes up to 1G as well, I don't bother to delete anything since.

I have a secure company email system, my cable ISP email account, and some accounts that come with domain hosting companies. These accounts changes so I keep my Yahoo as my primary personal account. But I'm not going to pay for it for the extras. With so much history, the emails are mostly spams.

My philosophy is that it's very inefficient to deal with emails one by one, especially the spams. So I leave the spams alone, also the regular promotions from every shop that I brought something, paperless statement alerts from all my accounts, etc, etc. When the time comes, it's easy to search for a particular company, account, email address, and then delete them all at one scoop. Then I search for keywords sex, penis, viagra, etc and delete them all in one go. What left are those spams that avoid keyword detections. However, by now they will group together because I have deleted other things in between. So it's rather simple to delete them in blocks or even one by one.

It sounds complicated but it's not bad. You only need to do one of the above every couple of months or even a couple of years. I don't need to and I don't have motivation until I stumbled upon the webmail extension of Thunderbird. Now I can have a POP account without paying for it, and I can use the sophisticated spam filters and create message filters using all open source software, = free.

BTW, I said that my main motivation for keeping a blog is for confession purposes. Obviously, it's therapeutic too. So I'm going to stay happy by continue blogging my previous Buenos Aires "adventure".