Wait? What? Sign up with 150 MSCs?

I'm signed up for 45 companies, but 99% of my shops are with the same 4 or 5 & most from the same schedulers.
I actually logged in to the Forum to ask how to decide which companies to drop!
My "issue" is the volume of email.
I use a different gmail address from my "real person" gmail address and have shop offers filtered to their own folder, but both gmail addresses show up in one "place" and the trash is combined.
My email trash holds 700 and then starts deleting the oldest, but I easily trash 700 shop offers in 3 or 4 days so any "real person" email I may have trashed accidentally is gone because of the volume of shop email.
Does anyone have a suggestion about how to manage this?
Thanks, HB

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Very simple. I just learned early on which shop offers I wanted to explore and which hold no interest. All of my email goes to one address. Twice a day I open a few job offers. the reset I deleted without even reading. I get 150 to 200 job offer emails a day. I probably read 10 of them and delete the others without reading, since I already know that they either do not interest me or are from MSCs/clients that I consider only if I am running short of opportunities with favored ones. BUT, none go to my spam/trash folder since I do not wish to have the system decide not to accept the emails in future.

Based in MD, near DC
Shopping from the Carolinas to New York
Have video cam; will travel

Poor customer service? Don't get mad; get video.

Over the last 11 years I have registered with somewhere around 150 companies. With some having gone out of business or merged, my guess would be it still leaves me with at least 120 companies. A week or so ago I did not check my mystery shopping email for three or four days. I had somewhere between 150 to 200 emails so I don't understand how you could have 700 from only 45 companies over the same amount of time. Despite the back log, it only took a few minutes to delete everything of no interest and another ten or 15 minutes to check the remaining emails before deleting them and emptying the trash.

In all honesty, I've never had a job or business that didn't require part of my day spent in checking email/voicemail followed by responding to clients or coworkers. The difference with mystery shopping is actually how little time it takes in comparison because I've never had a job where I could delete 45 out of 50 emails without even opening them.

Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you. It's not pie.
"I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag." -Molly Ivins
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It's a waste of your time and it really annoys the pig.

Why not simply let the messages pile up in their own folder without deleting or trashing them? That's what I do. Then, you won't have to worry about your important messages disappearing from the trash folder. Yes, it is sometimes hard to locate a particular message from a few days ago, but the search function helps with this (as would marking certain messages as important.) This may not be a good approach if you are OCDC, but is saves time in the long run.

Edited to add: Another approach is to archive the messages instead of deleting them. Archiving removes the messages from all folders without deleting them., but you can still locate them with them search function or by selecting the "All Mail" option.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2018 02:57PM by mystery2me.

Ninety-nine percent of my MSing e-mails are deleted without opening.

I usually get over 100 e-mails per day that concern MSing.

I find it's much faster to delete on my iPhone -- just a "swish", and it disappears....on my PC and/or laptop, I have to hit delete and then wait....it's just a few seconds each, but compared to the instantaneous "swish", it's slow, slow, slow!!!! I can delete 100+ e-mails on my phone in less than a minute.

That being said, many of my highest-paying jobs have come from e-mails; that's why I don't ignore them.

I have filters and folders set up. Subjects that contain _____ go to trash. Emails from my very special, most favorite MSC get their own FOLDER, and anything at all from my favorite-est scheduler is marked VIP and my phone buzzes & makes noise until I read it. And you can have duplicate emails bundled. A pain to customize, but so much better in the long run.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2018 04:48PM by Monk-N-Nut.

I have found that if you sign up for a few MSCs at a time, you can filter the e-mails that you know you aren't interested in. I have GMAIL and filter a lot of the shops to my forums tab, which I browse the subject lines occasionally then delete. The schedulers or shops that I know I want to hear from I keep in my primary tab, which sends me a notification on my phone when I receive it. I'm signed up for about 50 companies, but stopped since the last 30 I signed up for have produced no interesting shops for me. I live in a smaller town and do it more for a hobby than a career so it's not worth my time to sign up for 100+ companies.

That can and does happen. As an example, one scheduler will send up to ten e-mails for a pack and ship shop and then up to ten e-mails for a men's suit shop in the same day. That's up to 20 e-mails from one scheduler at the same MSC. Add in e-mails from other schedulers at this MSC, and e-mails from other companies and voilà, you have a few hundred e-mails in just a few days. It is an unnecessary time zapper, no matter what system you set up.

@LisaSTL wrote:

I had somewhere between 150 to 200 emails so I don't understand how you could have 700 from only 45 companies over the same amount of time.

MSF, I am registered with almost four times as many companies and located in a metro area of a couple million people with a boatload of shops. I can see it happening occasionally, like at the beginning of month when all the new shops are posted, but getting that many on an ongoing basis doesn't add up.

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