The European Union's attempt to increase consumer control of personal data has already had some useful effects. This puts it well ahead of earlier EU interventions, such as the annoying notifications of website cookies and the utterly pointless N versions of Microsoft Windows[1]. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has prompted me to clean up my mailbox, it has greatly improved email marketing lists, and some companies have used it to improve their business processes, according to an IBM survey.
You may well have ignored or just deleted the deluge of emails about the GDPR, and I can't blame you. I actually read most of them, to get an idea of the range of approaches and which ones worked best. I also searched my mailbox for the suppliers' domain names to see if I'd received any marketing emails, how often they came, and whether I'd read any of them.
In several cases there were more than a hundred unread emails, so I was able to select and delete them all at once.
I don't read most emails because if I did, I'd never get any work done. I just delete the obviously useless 40 percent unread, and reply to the half-dozen or so that matter. That usually leaves a dozen or more unreads that are not obviously useless but don't obviously need my attention. "News announcements" (ie PR) quite often fall into that category.
If my search turned up a bunch of useless emails, I unsubscribed. As a result, my mailbox is slimmer and should be cleaner in the future.
While many companies will no doubt be alarmed that their mailing lists have shrunk dramatically - actual numbers welcome - they should be grateful. The people who have opted in must feel their