How to Subscribe to Infinite Mailing Lists

This is a quick hack, but a useful one.

Here's the hack:

• Create a new and separate Gmail address, whose purpose is to be a "reading material" email address. The purpose of this email address is to sign up for mailing lists and reading material - that's it.

• Once you have done that, log in to your primary email address. Find every mailing list you're subscribed to, and unsubscribe. This will give you a massive feeling of relief.

• Sign up for the mailing lists you wish to keep on your reading list, but this time do it using the new mailing list email address.

• This is key: on your phone, your laptop, any device, log out from your primary email address, and log in permanently to the new reading material email address instead. (This is a big security win - you're no longer permanently logged in to a sensitive personal email address just so you can read a monthly newsletter on your phone.)

This approach has several advantages:

• Being permanently logged in to your primary email address on your computer or phone is a big security risk, since once a malicious actor has access to the device, they have access to your primary email, and through your primary email, the power to reset passwords for just about every service linked to that email address. (Yikes.)

• Splitting high-impact duties from mundane duties (getting the newspaper versus the ability to reset the password for your bank account) is a good decision always. Now you can stay permanently logged in to the mailing list email address, and read about your favorite baseball team or cryo currency, without risking a massive security compromise or idientity theft because you were permanently logged in to your identity-attached primary email address.

• Having a separate email address greatly reduces the anxiety around signing up for new mailing lists. Since every new mailing list email goes into one giant melting pot of reading material - a cross between a digital un-library and a well-organized email inbox with the opposite goal of Inbox Zero - there's no concern that signing up for a new mailing list is going to create a new and unwelcome stream of distractions in your primary email account. It goes into a reading room that can accumulate - if you so desire - centuries' worth of unread material. With a mailing list email address, you will feel none of the anxiety of having to read the material your un-library is accumulating, and you will gain all of the benefit of having a vast library that you can wander through in your free time.

• (Hence, infinite mailing lists.)

Pro tips:

• When you sign up for a new mailing list, it's good to create a filter for that mailing list as soon as it shows up in your reading inbox. The way my reading inbox is set up, I'm signed up for dozens of mailing lists, but only two or three emails actually arrive in the inbox each weekday (and one on the weekend).

• By picking the most important mailing lists and having them filtered to always be delivered to the inbox, it helps cut through the noise of dozens of mailing list subscriptions.