Please stop writing. The toaster is fine.

I listened to a lot of Mitch Hedberg in college. He had a bit about how easy it must be to name kitchen appliances: say what the thing does, add “-er,” and go on break.

A toaster toasts. A blender blends. Oh, Mitch. If only you were here to see it.

The toaster people now wish me a happy birthday, try to upsell data-insight subscriptions to optimize my toasting, recommend bread coupons for my wife’s pregnancy, and send animated appliance-related holiday cards. I wanted warm bread. Apparently, they wanted to watch my family grow.

There is a small, unreasonable part of my brain that believes unsubscribing from a company’s emails might somehow end my entire relationship with them

My bank will stop sending promos. The store I hate will stop giving 25% off “just for me.” And I’ll never receive another throwaway message ever again. Amen.

I know better. I started a company that helps people manage this stuff. And yet, until recently, the safest course seemed to be receiving everything forever.

Including an airline’s weekly suggestion that I go somewhere.

I would like to.

Somewhere you can’t email me.

In fact, I have a problem with the word email itself.

It describes how something reaches us, but tells us almost nothing about whether it deserves to. A message from a friend, a newsletter we chose, a verification code, and a shop announcing winter has arrived all land in the same place.

Because some of it matters, I hesitate to get rid of any of it.

Even emails from the same company serve different purposes.

A flight cancellation tells me something I need to know. A promotion for cheap flights tries to sell me something else. Same logo, but it’s making very different claims.

And I don’t want to suggest I hate every newsletter (just almost all of them). Sometimes, I love to read a well-crafted newsletter about toasters, but it doesn’t mean I want to subscribe to every single piece of breakfast philosophy. Being a one-time customer has somehow become an invitation to keep talking to me. And because useful messages arrive alongside the rest, I worry about withdrawing that invitation.

So I delete individual emails. Every morning, another small shift at the inbox factory. Companies automate the sending; I supply the unpaid labor of deciding what matters and making everything else disappear.

That arrangement scales beautifully for the sender. Meanwhile, I still have to get the kids dressed.

In my first post, I wrote about “automation versus automation.” If companies have software constantly working to reach us, we should have software working on our behalf, too.

Yorba’s new mailing list automation is our first full step toward that promise.

I turned it on and set it to keep monitoring and keep removing, like a little email Roomba going back and forth, catching all this crap and throwing it away.

Within the first week, it removed me from 393 mailing lists across multiple inboxes, both personal and professional.

Based on their sending volume, that’s an estimated 919 fewer emails per month, or 11,028 per year.

Eleven thousand little requests to stop whatever I’m doing and determine whether I give a shit. Usually, I don’t. But establishing that still takes something from me, until now.

I couldn’t have named most of those organizations. We were apparently close enough for them to write constantly and distant enough for me to have no idea who they were.

But even though monitoring every email is hard, it’s sometimes harder to hand over that trust, so we offer an option to keep messages in the trash for 30 days before they’re permanently deleted, giving people time to retrieve anything they want to keep.

It follows general minimalism principles, most notably from physical decluttering, putting things in a box for a month before donating them. Perhaps you’ll need something. Perhaps you’ll discover you were mostly storing guilt. We allow that as well for the cautious-minded and digital hoarders.

And the important emails? In my experience, they kept arriving. My banks, phone company, and healthcare providers could still reach me with the service messages I needed.

Unsubscribing from a marketing list is different from blocking all messages from a company or deleting your account. In my inbox, that distinction held up.

The fear of missing something does useful work for businesses. It keeps us available long after we’ve lost interest. Think about the hesitation over leaving Facebook: what about the birthdays, the invitations, that one group? You can stop enjoying a place long before you actually leave it.

There are newsletters I want, people I want to hear from, and messages I need, but each unnecessary email makes those harder to find.

This publication should earn its place, too. That’s why we didn’t launch it as a mailing list. We haven’t earned that space in your inbox. For now, you choose to come here. If it stops being useful, you can stop coming.

The toaster is fine.

Less, please.

Chris