Pssst. How many e-mail messages are in your inbox?

Published 5/2/06

Like crumpled news clippings stuffed in a file, like John Denver albums in the attic, like a closet full of out-of-fashion pants with pleats, like stale glazed donuts in the bread box, I just can’t seem to throw away yesterday’s e-mail messages. Or last month’s messages, for that matter.

My inbox of e-mail messages provide me with an unofficial “to do” list—things that people want me to do, like “Jack, please rewrite the column about your outsized inbox and do something dog related.” It’s also a cyber library of sorts, containing e-mail newsletters, online editions of newspapers, documents for free-lance writing projects and answered requests for forgotten password numbers. I also save messages from my friends—okay, my friend—so I can simply reply and hit…“Reply.”

Then there are those things you just can’t throw away. On December 1, 2005, I received a “high priority” message with an attached 19-second RealPlayer video entitled, “What your dog really does when you let him out.” In this clip, a white and grey mix of a mutt sits behind his dog house while his master calls from her back door, “Bennett! Time for dinner!” Out of view of the owner, “Bennett” takes a drag on a cigarette and then emits a short human-sounding hack. Many of you would know the name of the Andersonian who sent me this high priority message but I’ll spare him the embarrassment he so richly deserves. The video is quite amusing, for anyone easily amused. That would be my friend. That would be me, too, the one who still has it five months later. (I’d be happy to forward it to you.)

At black tie dinner parties, I tend to corner people and ask questions like, “How many e-mail messages do you keep in your inbox?” It’s a personal question and one that I say in a near whisper, the same tone of voice I would use to say, “How’s the investigation going these days?” It’s just that I’m always curious as to where I stand on the curve compared to the habits of other humans.

So after a couple looks of disbelief at dinner parties and because frankly my inbox had become a litter box, I decided to confront an e-mail stockpile that had accumulated to nearly 300 electronic missives. Give or take 10 or 30.

As I might have done on a daily and orderly basis, I then spent a full hour—or was it a full day?—organizing the messages into various folders, printing them out or just closing my eyes and hitting the “delete” button. I guess my amassing of e-mail is a kind of phobia. A fear that—like my old RCA 33 1/3 “Rocky Mountain High”—I’ll need it at some point and for good reason.

By the end of last week, I had down-sized my inbox to 50-some messages and was ready to conquer the world. “Conquer” being a relative term and because some e-mail induces unnecessary guilt, I’m now unsubscribing to mailers like the Mini Marathon News.

Of course, it’s a constant battle. My son is half way home from college, meaning sometimes he lives here, sometimes there. A few days ago I got three messages from him about softball equipment for our team, and he’s just two doors down the hall. If he had known the fierce battle that his old man was waging with e-mail apoplexy, he might have had the decency to walk down the hall or just yell prices of the chest protectors from his room.

So if you have an issue with one of my pieces, go ahead and compose for me an e-mail message. But instead of hitting “send,” print it out and use conventional U.S. postal procedures. That also saves me the paper and ink from printing it, which I always do before filing readers’ opinions in manila folders marked “Loves Me” or “Loves Me Not.”

Of course, I still have all those e-mails in my Deleted Items Box, which now contains 3364 messages and where they are deleted but not really. Like “An Evening with John Denver,” you never know when you might need one.