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The Unexpecteds: Unsubscribing

My mom is super organized, so she made her moving checklist before I did, and I got to crib off hers. One of the categories was “subscriptions.” She meant magazine subscriptions. Services like AAA and AARP. That sort of thing. I only subscribe to Writer’s Digest these days, and I get that digitally, so I crossed the whole idea off my list.

I had forgotten that I have a ton of other subscriptions, none of which will be useful to me going forward.

Email newsletter subscriptions. Specifically, the shopping ones.

Goodbye, stores I used to visit in person before you got a website. Goodbye flash sale sites with all your pretty, pretty goodies. Goodbye sites I bought one thing from one time and never bothered to unsubscribe from.

I keep a separate email address for shopping, and the Promotions tab gets about 40 emails a day. And how often do I look at them? Never. Almost never. When I know I need something and I want to see if that shop is having a sale.

It’s a mass email exodus, you guys.

And there’s only one mass change I’m dreading more. …the credit card. The auto payments. All of those will have to be changed over at some unknown point in the future. I can’t do it yet because I don’t have a new address to provide. My hell is limbo.

I’m also not sure how to tell all these catalogs that I no longer want them. I’ll be forwarding my mail to a family member, but why should she have to deal with the junk mail?

I went looking for ways to stop catalogs and found two services. (Both of which required creating new accounts. Irony.) CatalogChoice lets you select specific companies and then CC sends them the order to stop sending. So for the next month I’ll be making a pile of catalogs and then entering them here. DMA Choice is a service from the Direct Marketing Association, allowing you to take yourself off the lists that new advertisers purchase.

Hopefully that will stem the tide. And if not, I’ll be doing a fair bit of Skyping to subscription hotlines. “NOT IN THE COUNTRY. TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST, KTHXBAI.”

MY mailing list remains open for business.

Image by Svarta Baskern

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