causes for concern: email marketing

it's a rough month for zero-inboxers (sorry ya'll)

Welcome to Nervous Wreckage: Causes for Concern, a litany of trends, ideas, concepts, and zeitgeist-y things that have been unsettling me lately. It’s an inventory for hot takes, unpopular opinions, and general dissatisfaction. Paid subscribers, feel free to add your thoughts (or fight me!) in the comments below.

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I’m a zero-inboxer. I don’t like seeing unread messages in my email inbox. Peeking over someone’s shoulder and seeing they have approximately 64,892 unread emails makes me hyperventilate.

illustration by Pete Gamlen, courtesy of the NYT

How do people live like this? Don’t you worry you’ll miss an important message? Or, I don’t know, you’ll actually reach the storage limit for gmail or what have you?

And for that reason, today’s newsletter is all about the email marketing trends (specifically those uber-manipulative email subject lines) that are further weaponizing capitalism in order to ruin my wellbeing and plague my inboxes.