Chances are, your email inbox is a mix of important messages, shipping notices, bill alerts, newsletters you never read, and other easy-to-ignore missives.
But spam creeps in. Sometimes you do it yourself—enter your email address to win that contest!—and sometimes others do it for you. Thanks for that blank-of-the-month club email list, Grandma. Luckily, there are easy ways to kill unwanted emails, and they don’t involved sending invective-filled rants to the sender.
Unsubscribe Links Made Easy
The cleanest way to get off a list is to use the built-in unsubscribe option. That link is generally buried at the bottom of the message, in tiny type or made to not even look like a link, all the better to keep you subscribed.
(The chance that the unsubscribe link is a trick—a way to confirm you are a real person—is low. But be smart about it; if something looks fishy in any message, just delete it.)
Google Gmail
Gmail makes it easy to unsubscribe on the desktop. Whenever it notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender’s email. In fact, sometimes it appears in place of the Spam icon in the toolbar. Click it and a giant Unsubscribe button appears.
(Image: Google Gmail)
On mobile, tap the three-dot menu up top; if the sender offers an easy unsubscribe option, the word Unsubscribe will appear on the menu.
Microsoft Outlook
Prominent unsubscribe links are also found on Outlook.com and the Outlook apps as well. On the web, it says “Getting too much email? Unsubscribe” at the top of a supported message.
Apple’s iOS Mail App
On the built-in iOS Mail app, look for a banner reading “This message is from a mailing list. Unsubscribe” atop your messages, which will email the sender with the unsub request.
Edison Mail
Edison Mail for iOS, macOS, and Android shows a large Unsubscribe button at the top of a message (with a Resubscribe button if you change your mind). Edison Mail also offers a Block option on messages, so you never have to see anything from the sender ever again.
What’s interesting is that not all email apps recognize unsubscribe links the same way, or support them within the same messages. Thankfully, when you’re on the mobile apps that support multiple services (usually Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, and IMAP accounts), you can unsubscribe across all the services.
Unsubscribe Services
Want to unsubscribe from mail in a big batch? Several services make it possible. The downside: you have to give these services complete access to your inbox for them to find messages with an unsubscribe option; sometimes that includes your contacts. Like Heinlein said: TANSTAAFL.
Unroll.me
Available on the web or via a mobile app, Unroll.me looks into the heart of your Outlook.com, Gmail/GSuite, Yahoo Mail, and Aol email account to locate messages you probably don’t want. You can also try an email address from another service.
In return, you get a list of all the senders you could nix; pick the ones you don’t want, and Unroll.me does the rest. It also offers a service called The Rollup so you can re-subscribe to select mailings, but they’ll get funneled to you via Unroll.me in a daily digest. You can edit (or deactivate) The Rollup any time.
Unroll.me is free, but it does want full access to your messages and contacts. Its parent company claims that it ignores personal email and anonymizes the messages it sees, but it’s using all of the data to sell market research.
Unsubscriber by Polymail
Unsubscriber is not cheap at $19, but that’s because it’s not making its money by selling your info to marketing firms and third parties. Created by Polymail—one of our 20 Tools for More Productive Email—the site asks you to log in via your Google account and then offers full bulk unsubscribe and archive tools.
Leave Me Alone
With Leave Me Alone, you pay for credits ($2.50 for 50) that you can apply toward doing unsubscribes; one unsub per credit. It supports Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, iCloud, Aol, and any IMAP accounts. Connect them all. There’s also offer an account option for big teams.
Clean Email
A single account at Clean Email is $29.99 per year, or you can do up to five users for $49.99 per year or $99.99 annually for a full team (there are more expensive monthly options starting at $7.99). Like many others, it offers a web interface that aggregates your web-based email services (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IMAP accounts) in one big inbox that can be cleaned up in a few clicks, whether you’re bulk unsubbing, black-listing senders, or setting up filters and rules.
