My wife committed the most Cardinal of Web 2.0 sins this week. She created another Gmail account because her original one had too much "spam"...What? Is that even possible? It got me to thinking how each person approaches email fatigue and spam. Since I don't have a target class to electroshock and test, I'll use my wife and myself:

I rarely read all of my mail(sorry). I usually sit on www.gmail.com all day and skim the subject lines. I have A LOT of news alerts and job/resume emails so I only click on what interest me. You can say my first and foremost "lifestream" is Gmail. After about 20 to 40 unread emails pile up I just highlight the "unread" and mark as read, no worries. Yes I accumalate a huge amount of email like that but it's Gmail right? I've barely scratched my 7 gig limit. I have a lot of spam also, but I let google handle the spam side with a clean sweep once a month I believe. I'm not really sure since they filter it out so well!

My wife though signs up to a lot of things and then changes her mind. She has more friends than me online and spends a large amount of time viewing the pics and videos they send each other. Sometimes these "sign ups" lead to other companies getting her email address and spamming gets kinda crazy at this point. One day I saw her manually deleting spam in her spam folder. I tried my best to control myself but I blurted out "Baby, what are you doing??? Gmail deletes Spam automatically!!!!!" She just looked up at me and said "I know, but I don't want to lose anything I might want..."

As we see here, there are some who trust Gmail's complex spam catching algorithms and some who don't. Some who willingly close their eyes and faithfully step on the online cloud and some not ready. Some who don't mind 7178 emails in the inbox and some who like to start fresh and learn from their previous mistakes....