Deleting junk emails, and using DuckDuckGo Maps

Do you struggle with hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of emails in your inbox? Do you feel faint and a touch nauseous thinking about deleting all those emails? In the old days, we could curl up with a cup of coffee or tea on a rainy day and delete those old and unwanted emails.

I can almost remember a rainy day, but it's been a while.

Worry not, friend. Here's how to tame that inbox using the magic of the search function.

If your junk email filters aren't catching all the junk that comes to your inbox, try searching for terms that commonly appear in junk emails. For example, terms like activate, verify, password reset, account registration, and alert are standard junk email terms. Once the search results come back, take a quick look, deselect anything you want to keep and delete the rest.

Marketing emails from that store or site you bought something from once, years ago, can also add up. Before you delete them all, open one and scroll down to the bottom. Look for unsubscribe or manage your subscription. Click the link and unsubscribe, or click the link to manage your subscription. Now go back to your inbox and search for the store or website in your inbox. Once the search results come back, take a quick look, deselect anything you want to keep, like recent order confirmations, and delete the rest.

How about newsletters? You may have signed up for a particular newsletter back when you were "into that," whatever that is. But now you don't care about it the same way you used to. Even if you've unsubscribed from the newsletter, you probably have hundreds of old newsletters in your inbox. If you search for the newsletter sender, you can select them all and delete them all at once.

If you want to delete emails from a particular sender or topic, search for that topic or sender and delete all the emails in the search results.

If you're running out of space in your online storage, you can sort your emails by size in most apps and websites. Most of these large emails will have attachments. Be sure to download any pictures or documents you might need later, then delete all the emails bigger than 1 MB.

DuckDuckGo does maps, too

You may know DuckDuckGo as the search engine that doesn't track you or your searches. However, if you're trying to stay away from Microsoft's and Google's data-hungry business models but thought you're stuck using Google Maps, DuckDuckGo Maps is here to help, and here's how to use it.

Search for something using DuckDuckGo. Just under the search bar in your results, you'll see options for your search results, including Maps. Of course, if you search for a place, the maps will show up at the top of your results by default.

How does a little guy in the search industry, relatively, do a gigantic thing like maps? By partnering with Apple and using their MapKit technology. Apple has better privacy policies than Google and Microsoft, and DuckDuckGo's deal with Apple ensures that none of your data goes to Apple or gets stored by DuckDuckGo. As a result, the map results can be approximate unless you click the map pin icon to use your exact location. And even then, all searches and results are still anonymized by DuckDuckGo before being sent to Apple, and DuckDuckGo doesn't store any of that information after you finish searching.

Apple's MapKit tech experience isn't the same as Maps on your Mac or iPad. For example, you can't save favorites, see street views, get traffic information, and a few other things. But that's the trade-off for the greater privacy DuckDuckGo offers.

It could happen

For our anniversary, I bought my wife a world map and gave her a dart. I told her to throw it, and wherever it lands, that's where we'll go on our next anniversary after this pandemic is over.

It turns out we'll be spending two weeks behind the fridge.

Do you have a computer or technology question? Greg Cunningham has been providing Tehachapi with on-site PC and network services since 2007. Email Greg at [email protected].