Comment by cadamsdotcom
18 hours ago
I’m constantly amazed how passive people are with things that steal their attention
My phone is in do not disturb mode 24/7. If your app notifies me about something pointless, it gets deleted and I start using your website instead
I have a mail rule that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and unsubscribe to everything that’s arrived.
Whenever a retail point of sale worker asks for my details or phone number or asks me to sign up to their club, I ask if there’s a discount. Because if there’s no discount - they get no details. It’s a simple exchange; offer to pay a fair price for my details and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.
That unsubscribe rule is genius. (Obvious in hindsight, as the best things are.) Thanks for that.
if you're in Gmail this filter works really well for me:
("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
If you’re in gmail there’s literally already an interface to easily unsubscribe from stuff, it’s under “Manage subscriptions”. Yahoo similarly have a “subscriptions hub”
With the retailer asking for a phone number, I don’t see how it would ever be worth even entertaining. They will give you a discount once, then have and potentially abuse your information for years to come.
That's precisely why I don't ever accept the bribe. If I don't like the non-discounted price, then I don't buy it. Now they neither get the data nor the sale.
What's frustrating is that a lot of grocery stores do this. If you sell something absolutely necessary, such as basic foods, you should not be allowed to do the whole "mark it up to mark it down" strategy.
Also, a tip for most grocery stores (at least in the US): enter in any area code plus 867-5309. Chances are high that somebody has registered it. It's better than sharing with a family member because so many people are using it, the data becomes less useful.
Alternatively, ask the clerk to "use the store card". Usually, they will oblige.
You can make an email rule to filter those messages to trash.
I have my phone set to only ring for people in my address book. It’s probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my address book? Straight to trash.
Adding a filter is still extra work for me. Saying “no” stops the need for the rule and is less work than giving the info in the first place.
My phone is setup similarly. I did it manually back in the day, then sent some feedback to Apple, which they added in the next update about a year later. I’ve submitted a lot of feature requests, this was the only one they actually did, which is a great one. It made things much easier. Though they seemed to have changed the settings of how this works with the call screening feature. I used to have a shortcut to toggle this off and on, when I was expecting a call from an unknown number. I need to revisit my setup here, as the shortcut doesn’t actually do anything anymore.
Doing this to email is an interesting idea. If sitting in one ecosystem, maybe it would work. I’m fractured, so it’s a non-starter. Even beyond that, I think it would be an issue as there are real emails I do want to get which I’d never add to my address book, as I’d never send an email to the address. I think I’d want a whitelist for these addresses, that imported the emails from my address book as a base.
At work I had a rule like this for many year. Anything internal would pass, plus a few external domains I named. Everything else would go to a spam folder for vendor emails. Keeping up on this was hard. I ended up throwing in the towel a couple years ago after running the rule for 5-10 years. This blog post is what made me move away from this rule[0].
[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/
1 reply →
Yes - and a fair price would incorporate that.
Hence I doubt retailers will ever consider offering a fair price.
I made a more advanced version of the unsubscribe thing to kill all unnecessary notifications from email. I made it open-sourced:
https://unfuck.email
> passive
I get your point and see it as valid, yet to nitpick most people don't feel they have a choice.
Not answering the phone or replying to people's messages is a no-no to many, which sets them in an arms race against spammers and social apps trying to get them from all fronts. And they get frustrated by us living in no-disturb land 24/7.
I don't know it could be solved, but I feel for them.
For sure - some folks have to unwind expectations they’ve let themselves be under around responsiveness to messages.
Feels like an education issue rather than a tech issue.. thoughts?
I think it’s cultural. Someone sends you a message and knows you likely also have your phone on you. If you don’t respond they might feel ignored.
It can be hard to set phone boundaries with work. There are certain people who get very upset if I don’t answer their phone call.
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