I have twelve thousand unread emails. I am not going to do anything about this.
I want to be clear about that up front, because whenever I mention the number, someone looks at me with the expression of a person who believes the problem has a solution and the solution is to spend three weekends sorting things into folders. It doesn’t have that solution. The twelve thousand is not a queue. It is an archive. It is, specifically, an archive of receipts.
My inbox has become a receipt museum. I didn’t intend to open a receipt museum. I didn’t apply for the curator position. And yet here I am, in charge of a collection that documents, in exhaustive detail, every object I have ever purchased, every service I have ever subscribed to, and several items I cannot identify at all.
Last Tuesday I was looking for an email from Brian, who is my son the orthodontist and who had sent me driving directions to his new office in Cincinnati. In the process of looking for this email, I passed through several years of receipts. I found a confirmation from a company called ModernNest for a return I made in April of 2019. It thanked me for my patience and assured me that my refund had been processed and that it had been a pleasure doing business with me.
I have no memory of ModernNest. I have no memory of what I bought there. I have no memory of returning it in April of 2019, or of being patient, or of it being a pleasure for anyone involved. And yet there is the confirmation, the email timestamp, the transaction number, and the reassurance that my refund should appear on my statement within seven to ten business days. Which would mean it appeared sometime in May of 2019, seven years ago, and I can only assume it did.
Below that was a receipt for something called a “thermal carafe” from a retailer whose name I am leaving out of this column because I don’t want to speak ill of a company that may have done nothing wrong. The receipt shows that the thermal carafe cost $34.99, that I purchased it on a Thursday, and that it was shipped to my address here in Westerville.
I don’t own a thermal carafe. I’ve checked. I checked the cabinet where a thermal carafe would logically live. I checked the other cabinet. I asked Don, who knows where everything in this house is because Don is the one who put everything somewhere. Don didn’t know about a thermal carafe either.
We are now both mystified by the thermal carafe. It is the mystery of our later years.
Then there is the email that arrives every Wednesday from a company called ThreadCraft Home. It arrives with a cheerful subject line, usually something like “New arrivals this week!” or “Sale ends tonight!” It has been arriving every Wednesday for approximately three years. ThreadCraft Home is, as best I can determine, no longer a company. Their website leads to a parking page. Their social media has not been updated since 2023. And yet the email arrives every Wednesday, optimistic as a robin, from a server that has apparently not received the news.
I don’t know what ThreadCraft Home sold, though I believe it may have been housewares or possibly linens. I never purchased anything from them, which is how I ended up on their list in the first place, because you sign up for a 10% discount you intend to use and then you don’t use it and the company eventually ceases to exist and still you are on their list.
Somewhere in a data center, on a server nobody maintains, there is a mailing list. My address is on it. Every Wednesday that server sends a marketing email to me and possibly to several other people who are also receiving communications from a company that has been dissolved. We are the congregation of a church whose pastor left years ago. The sermons keep arriving. Nobody knows who is giving them.
Don suggests I unsubscribe. I have explained that you can’t unsubscribe from a company that no longer exists. The unsubscribe link leads nowhere useful. I’ve tried. I’m now in a subscription relationship with an absence.
I did eventually find Brian’s email with the directions. It had been filed, automatically, into a folder called “Family,” which I set up in a moment of organizational optimism in 2021 and then forgot about entirely. There were four hundred and twelve emails in the Family folder. None of them were from ThreadCraft Home.
My inbox will remain as it is. I’ve made my peace with it. It’s not a problem to be solved. It is a record. Somewhere in those twelve thousand emails is the complete commercial history of a person who bought things, returned some of them, and subscribed to newsletters she didn’t read, and lived to be surprised by all of it.
I find that reassuring, on balance. The thermal carafe is out there somewhere, keeping something warm.
