...for sufficiently large values of "normal"
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I got email from a company advertising 40% off and that they "don't normally do this."
It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
Looks normal to me.
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@CDarklock said:
I got email from a company advertising 40% off and that they "don't normally do this."
It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
Looks normal to me.
post the email or it didn't happen.
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Here's the current and last year's message sitting in my GMail inbox.
Oh, but they did have one more H in the subject last year.
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@CDarklock said:
It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
You keep year-old advertisements?
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@Heron said:
@CDarklock said:
It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
You keep year-old advertisements?
We have to. My cousin told me it's Federal Internet Law to keep all emails for 2 years. Hey... wait a minute!!1!
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Why bother deleting anything if you got GMail?
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@Shinhan said:
Why bother deleting anything if you got GMail?
I keep e-mails from friends and family, sure, or e-mails regarding projects I'm working on, but ads from last year? Come on.
Of course, my gmail account is merely a glorified alias. I only hang on to it to use googletalk (and sometimes to search old chat logs).
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@Shinhan said:
Why bother deleting anything if you got GMail?
People send me a lot of videos and powerpoint presentations with "funnies". I hate most of them, but every now and then there's an ok one so I let them keep sending.
This screenshot was taken last August. The inbox was ~97% full, I think. It then proceeded to reach 99% and I've cut it down to 85% sometime in October.
It's at 88% now. No warning yet. I think it appears at ~89 %.
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@Shinhan said:
What does GMail have to do with it? GMail has a quota, my hard drive, where my normal email goes, does not, so I'd be more likely to delete things from GMail. Or are you one of these people who has never known anything but webmail, and is comparing GMail with lower-quota webmail services?Why bother deleting anything if you got GMail?
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Yes that is perfectly "normal". In our local newspaper there is a guy/company selling luxurious persian carpets for "unbeliavable" prices cause the went to bankrupt and are beign liquidated etc etc...
They go bankrupt every year, the same company, the same name, similar carpets.
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Last year's deal only included three Hs. This year you get 40% off AND another H at no additional charge.
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There's a cookware store in one of the malls here that's been having the same "up to 80% off" liquidation sale for over 2 years. Constantly. The signs never went down.
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@msntfs said:
Yes that is perfectly "normal". In our local newspaper there is a guy/company selling luxurious persian carpets for "unbeliavable" prices cause the went to bankrupt and are beign liquidated etc etc...
They go bankrupt every year, the same company, the same name, similar carpets.Where I live, all carpet sellers do that. Sure, some do it in a more aggressive fashion, like writing an ad in a regional newspaper that looks like a newspaper article reporting about why this time, it's really, really their final sale. They even reason that the company's owner who, according to them, runs the store only together with his wife, and that he can't do it any longer because he had an operation and is unable to proceed with his work, also his wife will quit because she'll have to care for him and it's time for them to retire anyway. But it never happens! It's things like that that made me lose fate in human sanity.
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@NSCoder said:
What does GMail have to do with it?
GMail is what the OP is using. Hence the joke, which is itself a reference to GMail's own "why baleet anything when you haz lots of space??" marketing effort.
@NSCoder said:
GMail has a quota, my hard drive, where my normal email goes, does not...
Yes, but you have to pay for your hard drive. Also, it technically has a quota, just a very large one.
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@Aaron said:
This is not uncommon to see. Usually it's an outside liquidator who has acquired the rights to trade on the original company's name as part of the liquidation. They'll continue bringing in more merchandise to sell under the guise of liquidation until either the lease or the name rights are up.There's a cookware store in one of the malls here that's been having the same "up to 80% off" liquidation sale for over 2 years. Constantly. The signs never went down.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Oh, I haven't seen that marketing. Maybe it got caught in my internal spam filter or something.@NSCoder said:
What does GMail have to do with it?
GMail is what the OP is using. Hence the joke, which is itself a reference to GMail's own "why baleet anything when you haz lots of space??" marketing effort.
@morbiuswilters said:
I figured somebody would say that, but email will never fill that quota, since it takes a much smaller fraction of my disk space than things like photos and music, so I'm likely to get a new hard drive (or move things around to existing external drives) long before email would come close to filling it. And I have to pay for a hard drive whether I'm storing email on it or not, so, given that email doesn't take up a large fraction of the space, I don't think I end up paying any more for having my email on it. But if I do... well, vague mumblings about watching ads versus paying, the inconvenience of quotas, and I've had the same email address (a forwarder) since at least six years before GMail was born so get off my lawn. In any case, Í'd be more likely to delete email from GMail than from my real email account, since GMail has a much smaller quota.@NSCoder said:
GMail has a quota, my hard drive, where my normal email goes, does not...
Yes, but you have to pay for your hard drive. Also, it technically has a quota, just a very large one.
Of course, all of this is irrelevant since I have the answer to my question already: apparently GMail has a slogan about not deleting email.
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@vt_mruhlin said:
Last year's deal only included three Hs. This year you get 40% off AND another H at no additional charge.
No, this year's deal has three H's.
Which I suppose means that not only do I get 40% off the products, but I even get 20% off "Shhhh".
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Is this 1999? Are we discussing two spam letters separated by a year?
Next thing - someone will write a complaint about an unsollicited letter to the company starting with "Dear sirs, I'm afraid your email lost it way when it got into my mailbox".
Despite the fact I don't post my email address around, I get at least 50 spam messages every day. And that's only counting after my association switched to using Google as the mail server, which probably cuts some worst offenders out before they even hit the box.
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I assumed they were bacn rather than spam. If they were spam, well, that's even less remarkable. Sometimes I get several spam emails with the same dishonest subject on the same day.
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Since this thread is going down the road of "keeping" data and even "sharing" emails and using GMail to search your emails for useless emails in years gone by, let's have SpectateSwamp opine in here.
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@NSCoder said:
Sometimes I get several spam emails with the same dishonest subject on the same day.
Well, on that front... I'm particularly fond of this guy, who sends me ALMOST the same email three times a day, and has done it for years.
And here's the crappy part: it's not spam. He's a client.
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@NSCoder said:
Sometimes I get several spam emails with the same dishonest subject on the same day.
One of my domains has three publicly-listed addresses which all direct to the same mailbox. (heron@, product@, and support@)
At least once every day, I'll get a set of three spam e-mails at almost exactly the same time:
- Special offer heron@example.com receive 73% OFF on Pfizer.
- Special offer product@example.com receive 78% OFF on Pfizer.
- Special offer support@example.com receive 80% OFF on Pfizer.
The percentages are always random, but the rest of the subject line is exactly the same. I haven't checked the message contents, but I would assume there's little variation in them.
I suppose I should set up an filter so my mail server won't even accept mail from known spam sources, but I'm kinda lazy...
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@derula said:
Where I live, all carpet sellers do that. Sure, some do it in a more aggressive fashion, like writing an ad in a regional newspaper that looks like a newspaper article reporting about why this time, it's really, really their final sale. They even reason that the company's owner who, according to them, runs the store only together with his wife, and that he can't do it any longer because he had an operation and is unable to proceed with his work, also his wife will quit because she'll have to care for him and it's time for them to retire anyway. But it never happens! It's things like that that made me lose fate in human sanity.
False advertising?
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@Heron said:
@CDarklock said:
It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
You keep year-old advertisements?
You delete email ever?
The cost of the storage space for old email is less than the effort of moving my mouse to the "delete" button. Especially on Gmail, where storage is free, but also on my corporate email. Once you have full-text searching in your email client, there's no reason to ever delete anything.
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@derula said:
@msntfs said:
Yes that is perfectly "normal". In our local newspaper there is a guy/company selling luxurious persian carpets for "unbeliavable" prices cause the went to bankrupt and are beign liquidated etc etc... They go bankrupt every year, the same company, the same name, similar carpets.
Where I live, all carpet sellers do that. Sure, some do it in a more aggressive fashion, like writing an ad in a regional newspaper that looks like a newspaper article reporting about why this time, it's really, really their final sale. They even reason that the company's owner who, according to them, runs the store only together with his wife, and that he can't do it any longer because he had an operation and is unable to proceed with his work, also his wife will quit because she'll have to care for him and it's time for them to retire anyway. But it never happens! It's things like that that made me lose fate in human sanity.
Reminds me of "Don't Mess with The Zohan" and the store that was named Going Out of Business.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Heron said:
Yes. I can't fathom a reason that I would want to keep all this shit around. What possible scenario would necessitate me needing to know that netflix mailed me "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay" in 5 years, or even 5 months? How about a notification that someone's following me on twitter? A notification to pay my scatlover.com membership bill? Do you keep around ad emails from services from which you unsubscribed long ago?@CDarklock said:
You delete email ever?It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
You keep year-old advertisements?There is definitely email worth deleting, but it's not for space reasons.
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@blakeyrat said:
Once you have full-text searching in your email client, there's no reason to ever delete anything.
I can think of two reasons:
1) storage quota - free doesn't mean infinite, and even "7 GB and counting" can fill up
2) searches take longer when there's more mail to search through.
But seriously, are you saying you keep year-old advertisements just in case you might have to search it later? I don't get why it's such a weird idea to so many people that someone might delete ad mail. I get e-mails every once in a while from mwave advertising that week's specials; there's literally no reason that will be useful to me once the week is over. What reason could you have to want to keep that sort of mail?
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@Aaron said:
There's a cookware store in one of the malls here that's been having the same "up to 80% off" liquidation sale for over 2 years. Constantly. The signs never went down.
When I was growing up, there was a store which was known for its exorbitantly priced furniture, which finally decided to go out of business because nobody wanted to buy their overpriced stuff. Their going-out-of-business (everything 50% or more off) was so successful it was in its 10th year when I last passed by there. Personally, I think it was just that it brought their prices down to a reasonable level, but...
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@Heron said:
1) storage quota - free doesn't mean infinite, and even "7 GB and counting" can fill up
So far the "and counting" part of that is increasing faster than my email consumption.
@Heron said:
2) searches take longer when there's more mail to search through.
Not practically.
@Heron said:
But seriously, are you saying you keep year-old advertisements just in case you might have to search it later?
No, I'm saying the cost of keeping the email ($0.00) is more than the cost of me moving my mouse to the delete button and clicking (very slightly > $0.00)
@Heron said:
I get e-mails every once in a while from mwave advertising that week's specials; there's literally no reason that will be useful to me once the week is over. What reason could you have to want to keep that sort of mail?
None. And yet, it's still cheaper and easier to keep than delete.
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@blakeyrat said:
No, I'm saying the cost of keeping the email ($0.00) is more than the cost of me moving my mouse to the delete button and clicking (very slightly > $0.00)
In addition to monetary cost, there is an emotional and organizatory cost to keeping email, which is >0.
Also, gmail's search field does not auto-search while I type, which means the search cost increases to the point where I figure it's probably equal to your "very slightly > 0".
"Search Now" buttons are so Web1.0.
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@blakeyrat said:
I'm saying the cost of keeping the email ($0.00) is more than the cost of me moving my mouse to the delete button and clicking (very slightly > $0.00)
And I'm saying that it costs more than nothing to keep your email.
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@belgariontheking said:
@blakeyrat said:
I'm saying the cost of keeping the email ($0.00) is more than the cost of me moving my mouse to the delete button and clicking (very slightly > $0.00)
And I'm saying that it costs more than nothing to keep your email.Someone's paying for it, but it's not me. At least, I get the same amount of email regardless of how much I delete, and I've never come close to hitting the limit.
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@dhromed said:
In addition to monetary cost, there is an emotional and organizatory cost to keeping email, which is >0.
I'd say rather that there's an emotional and organisational cost of deleting email. I can keep it by doing absolutely nothing; deleting it takes time and thought. So in general I only delete email at work where I have a pretty small quota. I guess if I used gmail more I'd eventually need to delete from that too, but I probably would just switch my forwarder back to my real email account instead (I've been meaning to do that anyway), since that's easier.
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@blakeyrat said:
@belgariontheking said:
Goddammit, you're not listening to me. Having old email lying around just plain gets in the way. I've listed a few emails that there is absolutely no reason to keep longer than the time it takes to read it, but here are some more.@blakeyrat said:
Someone's paying for it, but it's not me. At least, I get the same amount of email regardless of how much I delete, and I've never come close to hitting the limit.I'm saying the cost of keeping the email ($0.00) is more than the cost of me moving my mouse to the delete button and clicking (very slightly > $0.00)
And I'm saying that it costs more than nothing to keep your email.Alerts of a new reply to thread on whatever site.
Advertisements (okay to keep them until the sale period runs out, but if you're never going to to take advantage of it, why keep it?)
Basically any kind of notification. "blakeyrat has invited you to the event 'help me sort through all my old junk'"
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@belgariontheking said:
@blakeyrat said:
@belgariontheking said:
Goddammit, you're not listening to me. Having old email lying around just plain gets in the way. I've listed a few emails that there is absolutely no reason to keep longer than the time it takes to read it, but here are some more.@blakeyrat said:
Someone's paying for it, but it's not me. At least, I get the same amount of email regardless of how much I delete, and I've never come close to hitting the limit.I'm saying the cost of keeping the email ($0.00) is more than the cost of me moving my mouse to the delete button and clicking (very slightly > $0.00)
And I'm saying that it costs more than nothing to keep your email.Alerts of a new reply to thread on whatever site.
Advertisements (okay to keep them until the sale period runs out, but if you're never going to to take advantage of it, why keep it?)
Basically any kind of notification. "blakeyrat has invited you to the event 'help me sort through all my old junk'"
I used to think like you, but that was before GMail, where it is always easier to do nothing, than it is to make a decision, even if it's quite obvious that I will never need that email.
Can't we just all disagree on this one?
For smaller inboxes, the matter is different.
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And this is about their E-mail... imagine their hard drive organization. "yeah, I just kinda save everything in My Documents, It costs too much to actually organize it, you see."
The cost of clicking delete may be >0, but the psychological cost of trying to find your porn and having to sift through your letters to your incontinent Aunt aren't even expressable in human terms.
"Organizing" doesn't save time when you organize, but it's specifically intended to save time for the many times you go to access the organized data. you organize everything once, and then benefit from the organization many times. Of course, if you do that, you won't be able to start threads about the similarities between spam e-mails as if it's some sort of new surprising trend "OMG! they are LYING to me! How can they do this! It's such a great injustice!". It's spam. The reason you delete it is so you are not influenced enough by it to even remember next year when they send you the same thing sans an "h" because the whole concept of advertising through bulk-emailing is supposed to be so impersonal that it makes it repugnant to even consider being a possible target customer, and not deleting it is like checking a little box saying "Yes, I'd like to stare at this bloody subject line every single time I check my e-mail, at least until a new page of more exciting offers appears to push it to the next page".
