For you ladies who have been engaged for a little while now, you are already wise to this tip, but for those of you who are only recently sporting a rock, this advice is sage, if I do say so myself: set up an entirely separate email account for your wedding planning and give that address to all of your vendors or use it to register whenever you are requesting information online for your wedding.

Many brides don't know that when they sign up to attend a bridal show, or on wedding websites that feature several vendors, they are giving their okay for the vendors involved to contact them. It is considered another form of "opting in" to receive an email, therefore it is not technically spam. This is totally legal and buried in the fine print on the web sites or in the bridal show's literature. Depending on which photo lab your photographer uses, you may also receive emails forever and ever until the day you die, amen.

Having a separate email address will keep all of your wedding-related correspondence organized in one specific location and it will keep the literally hundreds of emails you'll receive from vendors from cluttering up your personal or business email inbox.

If you've already signed up using your private email address, there are some simple ways to bring that inbox back to normal. If you use gmail, you can go into the settings tab, and under filters, set a rule that forwards everything wedding related to a different account or straight into a specific folder or label. You can set this up to filter by incoming email address, keywords, and several other determining factors. You can even choose to have it skip your inbox altogether so that you don't have to look at it twice. Other email clients offer something similar (most call them "rules" instead of filters), so be sure to check out your options for whatever platform you use.

Another option is to unsubscribe from the mailings. By law, each newsletter sent out via email must include a full physical mailing address of the sender and an option to unsubscribe. You can unsubscribe by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom or by emailing the sender a simple note that says "please unsubscribe me from your list". You can also send them a letter via snail mail requesting to be removed from their list. Most vendors will not take it personally if you unsubscribe as it simply means you are not a qualified lead for them. In fact many email services charge by the number of subscribers, so I'd recommend unsubscribing if you are truly not interested in their services. It will save both of you time and energy.

Getting married doesn't have to mean surrendering all rights to your inbox. Give the vendors you'd like to hear from permission to contact you. Let the others know that you don't need their services.

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