Today I deleted 3 e-mail accounts.

Yes, 3.

Accounts.

You might wonder how I can have so many accounts that I can “afford” deleting three of them. Well, account hoarding happens.

92 unread emails. Hope I didn't miss any.

CC LeoAlmighty (Flickr)

Imagine that you lead a very active online life. Imagine that you are slightly paranoid about one day having your account compromised. It’s in general a good idea to have a few seperate accounts, like a personal, serious one, and one more anonymously named. You don’t always want the spam that signing up for competitions and newsletters might generate, to land in your regular inbox.

The problems starts when you have twenty of them. Or even thirty. One for each blog you ever started. Several with your name. One with a nickname for those annoying newsletters. Another for your freelance work, one for your spam and for your slightly less serious newsletters. I even have one with a name similar to “toomuchstuff@email.com”. I should dedicate one to my plethora of e-mail accounts soon.

Before deleting them, I made sure that all important accounts and profiles connected to them were closed. By important, I don’t actually mean that their content or form were particularly important to me. I simply made sure that the personal data connected to my profiles were deleted – sometimes it takes more than clicking that unsubscribe link. You might have to log in to delete a profile, or even ask the company to delete your user data. Write them anyway if you are in doubt and make sure that it’s confirmed. It might take some time, but it feels great to do some digital decluttering!

For unsubscribing newsletters, there are nifty little programs you can use, such as unrollme, but I haven’t tried this myself. I would prefer not to open yet another account for something. With each account and profile comes a password, and the burden of remembering these is also taken off my shoulders. Ok, ok – it might not be a burden on a daily basis, but quite the pain in the ass when you have to request a new password each time you log in because you’ve forgotten it. Right now I feel lighter and happier.

Do you want to feel relieved? I can highly recommend you to go on a digital deleting spree.