After Thanksgiving’s feast, you may want to unstuff something. I recommend your inbox. And today is the very best day to do it! Why? Because if a vendor is going to send you consumer email, it’s probably occupying your inbox right now.

Over the course of a year (or years), it’s easy to lose track of all the email lists you’ve ended up on. Usually by signing up for something, registering a product, attending an event or purchasing something. Software trials are an occupational hazard for me.

On a daily basis, there are only a few promotional emails and they are easy to ignore, though regular pruning is perhaps better than my all-at-once machete attack.

ComplyFoam, GovX, SocialBro, Proformative Webinars, Other World Computing, Mother Earth News, Lands’ End, Crashplan, OFA, HP, Epson, MapMyFitness, DeLorme, RadioShack, Ben Meadows, Adobe, Defenders of something-or-other, all gone in the last few minutes.

And this isn’t my first pass at my inbox, in search of mailing lists to assassinate. Most of this is not actually spam, since I did something to get onto their lists. My antispam program handles most of the unsolicited email.

Fiverr, MediaBistro, three Yahoo groups, a newspaper, Performance Bicycle, another Defenders, Starbucks, three political groups, you get the idea.

That’s more than 40, all email that arrived late yesterday or today. All now unsubscribed.

I did choose to remain on a some lists. These include Harbor Freight, new in my neighborhood; several computer publications; Foreign Policy, which I may pay for someday; the New York Times, which I do pay for; Slate, good for Facebook posts; and some others.

The best unsub experiences fill-in my email address and just remove me, perhaps giving me the chance to reconsider our parting of the ways. Others want feedback as to why I am leaving. Some require feedback to get off their lists. A few still want me to enter my own email address rather than auto-filling it. This requires me to go back to my inbox to find out which address received the email.

The “best” was Active.com, where the long, presumably personalized unsubscribe URL took me to a 404 error. I could not easily find another place to unsubscribe from their email, but will go back later today.

Edmund Scientifics, a BBC news alert, Daily Kos, Turtle Island, PBS, Movavi, Staples, Firebooks, Equinux (sent me German-language mail), a Spanish email I never understood but whose unsubscribe was in English, GreaterGood, American Stationery, the hits just keep on coming.

That’s more than 40 killed while writing this column, and doesn’t include some I shot down in the days leading up to this massacre.

I won’t say that killing all these lists — notice the violent terminology — makes me feel better. OK, I will say it. As a vegetarian, no animals were killed to make my Thanksgiving, but today I’m taking care of turkeys I truly won’t miss. Gobble! Gobble!

photo credit: oohlarock via photopin cc