I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the amount of automated e-mail that has reached my personal inbox and my academic inbox. I maintain special e-mail accounts for automated e-mail, commercial e-mail and anything that is not directly personal correspondence or academic correspondence.

I have been placed in an awkward position by two large entities that are notorious for their automated email. Google and AOL, for their Google+ and AIM properties respectively, have begun sending periodic e-mails to my personal email address. I did not opt-in to these messages. It is easy enough to opt-out, but that isn’t really the point, those e-mails should not have arrived in that inbox to begin with. I use my personal e-mail address with Google because Google hosts my personal email (and for everyone on the kularski.org domain). Several months ago I also decided to use the same e-mail address for communications via the AIM system because it made sense to keep all of my online IDs the same (except Yahoo, which is of course still in its own [rapidly collapsing] world).

Surprisingly I have used the same address with my Microsoft Passport/Windows Live/.NET/MSN/XBOX account and have received 0 messages (after initial confirmation). I use that account for so many services, but get no periodic e-mails and have not had to opt-out of anything. Microsoft is less invasive than Google and AOL, isn’t that odd?