I've been home sick for almost two weeks. I'm starting to mend thankfully. I was finally fever free for several hours today. I decided to do something productive without expending any real energy. I decided to clean out my inbox on my Outlook. I normally carry my iPhone everywhere with me and check my three main inbox via that. My work email, our family email, and my email for all stuff me.  My work email is synced (is that a word?) so that if I delete it on either computer or phone it goes away.

Unfortunately, I don't have the same deal with the other two. I realized that this may be a problem when I opened my Outlook for our family account and it loaded and loaded and loaded and loaded. Finally count? 10,684 emails not counting junk email. WOW! Why so many? Simple. I shop online 90% of the time. I'm not a shopper. I know. A female who doesn't like shopping. My mother's very disappointed. The bad side effect of this is that when you shop online you usually register on that site so you can track your purchases. Then you get lots of email notices about either your purchase or special offers. I realize that I've agreed to this because when you do register there's usually a small box or two that's already checked agree to receive email notifications from them and some of their partners. Thus begins the inbox virtual papering. Most of my inbox was full of such emails. That and Facebook notifications. The rest of my unwanted email seems to be from research requests for papers or stories I've worked on. They always to keep me up-to-date. Most of the time I can't even remember what I was researching.

After an hour and half of deleting and making sure I didn't get rid of things I need to keep (that electronic warranty I forgot about) I realized I need to pay better attention to what I'm agreeing to. I never get a good deal from these places because I get so much junk mail I don't weed through them. So tomorrow I'll spend the day unsubscribing to as many mailings as I can. It's not their fault really. It's what they are in business to do. I don't curse them. I just have to be more careful and remember the old adage: Always read the fine print or in this case, uncheck the boxes.