There's a new menace out there. Perhaps not all that new, but still annoying as hell, and something that online information sources really need to do something about.

It's the "automatic email notification" for all sorts of garbage that I really don't need to know about right away. And it's getting worse.

There are lots of information sources that I subscribe to. Some of them are things that I like to monitor very closely. Others are things that I monitor only occasionally. But all too often, the owners of this information act as if everything they put out at any time is necessarily of immediate desire to me.

The Wall Street Journal does this well. They give me a choice of the kind of notifications I want to receive, including the option of receiving only subscription-related notifications. I receive a couple of things a day from them.

Marketwatch does this less well. I subscribe to Herb Greenberg's pay service on their site because I find the information useful, and well worth including in my research. However, it's hardly a "real time" trading service that requires me to receive an immediate notification. Realistically, I'm going to go over to the Marketwatch website if and when I have time.

TheStreet.com and its various sub-entities are purely evil about this stuff. Jim Cramer will sometimes make half a dozen minor portfolio adjustments or comments each day. As I subscribe to his portfolio service, every single one of them generates yet another email that is dumped into my inbox. But really, I don't get a chance to read most of them until much later, and aren't likely to act on any of them unless they conform to my own research anyway. And all that takes some time. I'm quite happy to review their website once or twice per day and add each new set of entries to my thinking.

None of the "offender" information providers see a problem. None of them have any mechanism by which I can turn off these unwanted notifications. The only advice I have received is perhaps to use a "dummy" email account to send it all to. That solution works fine -- except that it means I'll also miss some other notices that perhaps I DO want to get, and certainly it means I'll miss the critical subscription notices that show up every year or so.

The result of this is that I have built up an increasingly complex set of email rules that cause about 90% of my "subscription spam" to be deleted unread. Roughly another 8-9% of my this stuff is filtered into seperate folders where I can review it later without clogging my inbox. My primary inbox is reserved for important communications.

Of course, this doesn't address the problem of what happens when I go away for a week and don't check my email at all. The stuff inevitably piles up on my server where it takes up space needed to store email that I want. While real spam is filtered out before it even gets onto my own email server, the "subscription spam" sits there taking up space until I access my email and a tool on my desktop sorts it out.

I am increasingly taking this into account when deciding what services to subscribe to. As far as I'm concerned, there's no excuse for anybody sending me emails that I don't need, regardless of whether or not I subscribe to their online service. Those who consider my subscription a "carte blanche" to bombard me with unwanted notices will find themselves lower and lower on the list.