How do you whittle down your number of online accounts?

Luckily, I had some foresight, and tagged almost all of the sites I have registered for in Gmail. Good thing I'm as big of a compulsively organized hoarder of email as I am of signing up for things.

I deleted over 30 accounts in the last 2 days. The really awful experiences of closing accounts were flabbergasting. You would not believe how many sites have no way of deleting your account on the site and you have to search a forum or find an answer on GetSatisfaction, or finally just email them. Email is a hassle and doesn't force them to respond. Also, there is no way to guarantee they deleted either, but that's an entirely separate topic. I understand they don't want people to cancel, but just flat out not providing a way to do it should be outlawed. Seriously. This is people's personal info we're talking about. I'm still waiting on about 15 to contact me. It's pretty sad actually. But the bulk of the work is done. I really think we need to standardize it so that any site that requires a login/password should have a mandatory 'delete account' function in the dashboard. Who's with me?

This could be a possibility http://suicidemachine.org/

While this doesn't help you to get rid of accounts you've already created, a cool resource that helps you to avoid setting up new accounts in the first place is http://www.bugmenot.com/. Their tagline is "bypass compulsory registration." They list shared logins for various non-commerce sites that require logins, like the NYTimes.

I know that this doesn't address the question directly, but I have learned from painful experience that email address stability is key to setting up accounts and managing them. If you no longer have access to an old email account, then it can be difficult to access accounts created with that address. I have converted most of my on line accounts to one of two email addresses so that I can better manage them...

To the question of whittling down accounts, what is the harm in leaving an inactive account fallow? I don't usually delete accounts, but do some year end maintenance and try to post a final message on accounts that I'll no longer be using.

I can describe one approach that might work, but it has its downsides as well. Instead of worrying about "unsubscribing", I simply block the e-mail address that the account is tied to.

I have my own domain so I fabricate an e-mail address for each account I use. For example, to post this answer I had to sign up to O'Reilly first, so the e-mail address that I used is "oreilly@mydomain.com".

My mail server is configured to use a wildcard to accept all e-mail addresses (i.e., [anything]@mydomain.com

I then can "unsubscribe" from O'Reilly by simply adding oreilly@mydomain.com to my e-mail account's blacklist, which will trash any new messages with that address.

The downside to using a wildcard to accept any e-mail address is that I am exposed to the messages resulting from directory harvesting attacks (a type of e-mail that tries to discover valid e-mail addresses) and my mail server sees plenty of messages as a result.

Normally, an anti-spam service such as Postini would block those directory harvest messages but because Postini will only block messages for specific e-mail addresses, it lets these harvest message pass through -- and assumes that your mail server will reject them if they aren't addressed properly. Fortunately the gmail spam filter is so good that I rarely see these bogus messages anyway.

This method isn't ideal but because spammers are so persistant, I take satisfaction knowing in being able to, in seconds, neutralize a spammer from ever being able to reach me again.