Category Archives: Email

Email, messaging, and the inbox.

Unsubscribing from Newsletters

Email, Tech

When Gmail first came out I got on pretty early and procured what I thought was a cool email address, mmmmmm@gmail.com. That’s because matt@ was too short, and matthew@ was taken. Ask anyone with a “cool” email address on a major service or Twitter handle and you’ll mostly hear about what a pain it is constantly getting spam, other people’s email, and people trying to log in to your account. These days it seems that address is used mostly by people forced to put something into an email form at places they don’t want to, so constant mail from mortgage places, car dealerships, porn sites, and countless email newsletters. I never ended up using the account for anything myself besides normal Google stuff.

There’s a service to help you unsubscribe from things called Unroll.me which is pretty neat, and it’ll scan your account to find all of the newsletters and things you can unsubscribe from, and gives you a one-click interface to do so. Unfortunately if you had over 5,000 “subscriptions” as I had, that becomes a 5,000 click operation and they provide no bulk tools, and apparently no plans to add them:

I assume this is because they want people to add newsletters to their digest service instead of just unsubscribing. Code to the rescue! Written by the inimitable Scott Reilly. After you sign up and sign in, go to this page, go to the javascript console (in Chrome: View → Developer → Javascript Console), then copy and paste the below code and press enter.


var i = 0;
function unroll_me_unsubscribe() {
// Bail if share modal (indicating free limit reached) is encountered.
if ( jQuery( '#fb-root' ).length > 0 ) { return; }
var unsub_link = jQuery( '.LetterList a.uicon-set-unsubscribe:first' );
if ( unsub_link.length > 0 ) {
document.getElementById( unsub_link.attr( 'id' ) ).click();
if ( i++ < 6000 ) { /* Upper limit in case something goes wrong. */
setTimeout( unroll_me_unsubscribe, 1500 );
}
}
}
unroll_me_unsubscribe();

view raw

gistfile1.js

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then sit back and wait, it’s set so every 1.5 seconds it clicks an unsubscribe link. I do this about once a week now since I can accumulate 20-100 new subscriptions in that time. This code will break if they change anything, but should be pretty easy to update when they do. It currently shows me as unsubscribed from 7,868 things! If there was a way to pay for my account on Unroll.me I would do so happily.

Funding Warning

Email

Just a warning for entrepreneurs out there, if you ever announce funding you will be contacted by people offering the following services: banking; debt financing; PR services; other VCs; fancy SoMA offices; telephone services; India outsourcing; Kansas IT outsourcing; recruiting (x10); equipment leasing; renting/leasing/buying real estate; stories about Audrey Hepburn; web analytics; bandwidth; data communications (?); Java programming. Expect 50+ emails in the first 12 hours, and a steady trickle after that. They will also send emails to firstname @ your domain for every name they can find on the website. It gives you a newfound appreciation for those nice Nigerian banking folks, who gave you attention before you were “big.”

Socialtext Spam

Email, Rant, ,

(Rant warning.) What’s it called again when you can’t unsubscribe from a service that sends you email almost every day? This is broken:

  1. I get my daily email about changes in the LoicLeMeur Wiki that I signed up for sometime at Les Blogs.
  2. “To stop receiving or change how often you receive emails about changes
    to LoicLeMeur Wiki, go to: http://www.socialtext.net/loicwiki/emailprefs “
  3. Redirects me to this URL.
  4. It appears that I am logged in. I change my preferences to “Never”
  5. Of course when I go to my settings it shows me as “user78247”, so I didn’t actually cancel my subscription, it just showed a stupid subscription page to me even though it obviously doesn’t have my email address right now and I’m not logged in.
  6. Okay, click the “log in” link.
  7. Type in email and password.
  8. I am now mysteriously redirected to the FOAFnet wiki, which hasn’t been touched in like a year. NO IDEA WHY.
  9. Wait, the top still has a login button, but also a settings button?
  10. Settings takes me to the user page for “user19254”, even though I JUST LOGGED IN.
  11. Okay, click login again.
  12. Now I’m redirected back to the FOAFnet wiki again but this time it shows me as being logged in.
  13. Where the heck do I go now???
  14. I go back to the Loic wiki via the address bar.
  15. It says login in the top right corner again.
  16. I enter my information, and am redirected by to the FOAFnet wiki. I can sense the wiki mocking me.
  17. Okay, maybe if I go back to my settings page where it worked.
  18. It forces me to login to the FOAFnet wiki AGAIN even though I did just SECONDS AGO.
  19. I now am logged in, I click on settings and go to “My Workspaces.”
  20. It only shows the FOAFnet wiki, even though I know I’m a member of the Loic one because I GET EMAILS FROM IT EVERY DAY.
  21. Also now for some reason every Socialtext wiki I try to visit, like this one from Web 2.0 conference, redirects me back to the FOAFnet wiki. (cue blood-curdling scream)

Any suggestions? I would just dev/null them in my procmail, but I prefer not to do that to legitimate companies. At what points could the user experience be improved?

(And yes, I have reported this problem to them. I demonstrated it in person in August 2005 at BarCamp. It’s January.)

Update: Socialtext responds in the comments. “[T]his morning we disabled email notifications for all the public wikis on our site, due to the confusion people had when trying to turn them off.” A thoughtful, effective, and quick response.

Email Reloaded

Email

So the long and short of it is, I’m loading all the email I receive into a database using a fun combination of Procmail, Spam Assassin, and a sprinkling of command line PHP. I’m very excited about this, more excited than I’ve been about a new project in a while. For me, email has been steadily waning in utility for the past year, and I want to breathe new life into it. I’m tired of folders. I’m tired of slow searching. I don’t want to hand my email over to someone else, even if it’s Google. I don’t want to deal with mbox or IMAP or maildir or any of that junk. Those are implementation details of various servers and clients.

Mirroring my email into a MySQL database has some interesting ramifications. Imagine instant Gmail-type searching using FULLTEXT or LIKE. Imagine instant email backup using MySQL replication. Think email RSS feeds, keyed on searches or senders or anything. Don’t forget the interesting metrics that can be extracted from this as well. Right now I’ve replaced my timely dozen with an counter running since this morning. If you send me an email, you’ll see it increment live. If it increments the spam counter you may want to resend it and reword your mortgage suggestion. This is the most basic of a hundred interesting things that can be culled from this data.

I want to hear your wildest dreams. Besides the obvious search, backup, and statistics benefits, what can you imagine this system doing? What would you like email to address? (groan…) What email metadata is interesting? (I’m currently tracking subject, date sent, date received, from, the message itself, and spam status.) What statistics would be interesting to you? Is anyone even interested in this or am I just spinning my wheels?

Today my mail lives in 400 MB of mbox folders I access using IMAP. Tomorrow I want something better.

Yahoo Mail (or lack thereof)

Email, Friends, RSS, Yahoo

I saw Ernie had done some work on the new Yahoo sites so I thought I’d log in to check it out. Notepad was… a textarea. Calendar was cool. Contacts still had all the information I had imported 4 years ago, which I thought was pretty neat. When I went to the mail tab, however, I was greeted by this not-so-friendly notice:

Your Yahoo! Mail account is no longer active.

Why is my account inactive?

Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because either:

  1. You have not logged into your account in the last 4 months, or
  2. You have asked that your mail account be deactivated

What does this mean?

  • All emails, folders, attachments and preferences have been deleted
  • All messages sent to saxmatt02@yahoo.com are being bounced back to the sender
  • You can still use your Yahoo! ID to access other registered services on Yahoo!
  • Deleted information cannot be recovered

Protect your account!

Subscribe to Yahoo! Mail Plus and you will not be required to sign in […]

I got tired of typing. I think everyone at Yahoo should be banned from using exclamation points for a month, even in their code. I hope I didn’t have anything important in that email account.

It’s Over

Email, Spam

An address that has never been on the web in text or javascript form has begun receiving large amounts of spam, starting a few days ago. This is not a dictionary attack, it is specifically targetted toward this single address. The address is not guessable or a dictionary word. Luckily the address is disposable.

The only form this address has ever been online is in a PNG screenshot I posted about a year ago.

Gmail Invites

Email

Gmail invites. The only thing I get on my Gmail account (mmmmmm@gmail.com) are people begging for invites, which has gotten very old very fast. It’s almost as bad as the people who stumble across my old Orkut entry and feel it’s my duty to invite them. I’ve given out one account so far, and it was to Simon.

Thunderbird 0.4

Email, Tech

As you may have heard, Thunderbird 0.4 has been released, and it’s a delight. I’ve been using Thunderbird off and on since I first heard of the project. I snubbed 0.2, as it was quite clunky. 0.3 changed my mind and became my default email client over Outlook Express, and I also set it up for my mom. However it was not so much on Thunderbird’s merits of the time that I switched, because it was still quite rough in many areas, it was simply the least bad of all the IMAP email clients I have tried. (And I’ve tried them all.) However this new 0.4 version is a pleasure to use. The graphics have been completely revamped, which is a much bigger deal than I would have thought and really changes how I view the application. (Literally.) Of course they were pretty patchy before, it didn’t even have a separate icon for mail you had replied to. The other problem I had before was that the program would get hung up on something, I’m not sure what, but when it was nothing would work until I restarted the application, which was annoying to say the least. I haven’t even seen a hint of this problem for about two months now (I’ve been keeping up with the weekly builds).

It just does IMAP so well. Having all my email and folders on the server makes it easy to try different email clients and not worry about importing, exporting, or keeping my data in sync. A few minutes ago, just to make sure I wasn’t remembering things wrong, I opened up Outlook Express again to give it another go. That’ll probably be the last time I ever do. Moving IMAP messages to different folders in Outlook Express opens a dialog box that actually precludes you from doing anything else in the application, so if you’re moving a message with a large attachment or several messages you have to wait for everything to finish before you can do anything else. For someone who lives in their email client, that is simply unacceptable. Thunderbird does all that in the background, and it’s so fast with most things that the “IMAP lag” is gone.

It’s not perfect, there are a few things I hope the Thunderbird team addresses in future releases. First is the spell check, which rocks but always wants to spell check the name of the person I’m replying to in an email. Second when I forward a message inline it includes all the headers, which can often be twenty or thirty lines, most of it junk that isn’t important. Just give me from, to, subject, and when it was sent, and I’ll be happy.

Thunderbird understands that on some IMAP servers, including mine, some folders contain mail messages and some just contain other folders. Outlook Express would try to select these “holding” folders and return an error, where Thunderbird shows them in italics so they’re visually set apart from the folders that hold actual mail. Thunderbird is also supposed to have some great spam handling, but since I handle all that on the server side I can’t speak to that personally.

Bottom line: try it out. You have nothing to lose and you might just find that perfect email application you’ve been searching for. The best thing about it is I know that right now another version is in the works, and in a few months they’ll be a 0.5 I can rave about. Or I could wait until 2006 for a new version of OE to come out with Longhorn. Right.