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Cleaning Up Old Emails and Accounts

Every month I receive ~5000 spam emails.

I am not very surprised, knowning that my email addresses appear in ~20 data breaches. Email providers filtered out most of them, but after filtering I still receive ~100 every month.

It is very annoying when I'm interrupted by an email notification, only to realize that it's from a spam email. Meanwhile I cannot just disable all notifications.

Three months ago, I started to try to improve the situation. First of all I explored options for email aliases. Then in the past 3 months, I have been manually reviewing all email messages in the inbox. That are in total ~70k messages.

Basically I'm creating a whitelist of senders, and I only enabled notifiation for allowed messages. This turned out to work quite well, I can clearly feel the improvement of life quality. Occassionally I may still need to manually review other messages, but that's OK.

Meanwhile, I took this opportunity to review all accounts that I have previouly registered, and tried to remove those no longer being used.

Stats by Domain

Obviously I cannot review all ~70k email messages one by one. So I just group them by the top level domain of the sender, which are ~2k in total.

For ~650 domains, the emails are just legit email communication. And ~900 domains just sent me spam emails. Most of the spam emails actually came from ~10 years ago, when spam filter didn't work well yet.

The rest consists of  ~500 domains that know my email address. For ~200 of them I have legit account that are still more-or-less being used, so I created aliases for each of them. For ~150 of them either I manually deleted my account, or the account just expired.

There are ~40 domains where I requested deletion of my account, but did not receive any reply or confirmation.

Finally, ~100 domains no longer exist, e.g. the company got bankruppted. So there is nothing I can do.


Deleting Accounts

As mentioned above, out of ~500 accounts, ~300 are no longer needed, and I want to removed the account and all my data.

Only a few website would offer a "delete account" button in the account/profile/settings page. 

Many websites explicitly says something like "please visit this URL if you want to excersise your right according to GDPR". I guess they may not offer this option at all if GDPR didn't exist. In this case, very often it is handled by a third-party form, I guess just for triaging. Most of them are easy, I just need to verify my email address and submit a request, a few days later I would receive a confirmation that my data has been successfully deleted.

But I also observed a funny one, where I don't need to verify that I own the email address. This means anyone who knows my username and email address can request to delete my data!

On the other hand, It is still very difficult to delete my data on some websites. To name a few:
  • Some requires me to make a phone call.
  • Some requires me to do one or more live chat sessions, which typically verifies lots of security information.
  • Some requires me to give more information (e.g. phone number) before I can delete my data.
  • Some says in the policy that users cannot modify their email addresses.
  • Some says in the policy that users cannot delete their data. Typical for (old) BBS/forum systems.

Password Policies

For the accounts that I still want to keep, I took this opportunity to use a strong password, if the previous one seems too weak.

Apparently, not all websites accept my strong passwords. Typical requirements are:
  • The password must be shorter than X (typically 16) characters.
  • The password must not contain special symbols.
The worse scenario is, these requirements are not checked during password reset, but checked during login. Very often I have to reset the password because of this.

I think these requirements are stupid.


Internet Before 2014

Browsing through old emails, I just got reminded of how the Internet looked like 10+ years ago:

  • Email was my primary communication channel with friends. Smartphones didn't exist or was not popular.
  • Some security measures are jokes with today's standard. HTTP links, plaintext passwords etc. Some websites even offer to retrieve (instead of reset) your plain text password.
  • Font sizes in embedded web pages seem very small. I think it might be related to the changes of CSS units due to high DPI screens.
  • Spam emails were not filtered well. Maybe the email protocal had serious flaws. For example, I received spam emails that appear to be sent by myself and to myself. I guess this can nolonger be achieved today.
  • The content of spam emails have been following an ever-changing trend.


Final Words

It's been a large project, and an interesting journey. I'm grateful that most emails are kept. In fact my earliest email address started around ~2000, but the email provider cleared the inbox for some reason.

It is interesting to review how the Internet looked like 10+ years ago, and it is important to get myself reminded that the Internet is very different today.

It is especially important to take measures to protect my private data. Otherwise, I may create another 500 accounts without even knowing it!

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