Mostly, our email inbox has a mix of important messages, some subscriptions, and a lot of junk. Be it the newsletters that are never read or other spam messages.
Mostly you bring that spam upon yourself —enter your email address and win a cash prize —and sometimes other people do it for you. But the good part is that there are a few very easy ways to kill unwanted emails, and none of them involves sending invective mails to the sender.
Let’s find out some of these ways.
Unsubscribe Links Made Easy
The easiest and the smoothest way to get off a list is to use the unsubscribe feature. Generally, the link to unsubscribe is kept at the bottom, in the smallest font possible so that it beats the reader's eyes.
There can be a slight chance that the unsubscribe button is also baited just to confirm that you are a real person, so be a little smart about it. If the message seems fishy just delete it in that case.
Google Gmail
Gmail helps us with this unsubscribe issue. Whenever a working unsubscribes link is found in the message Gmail puts a link of its own on the top of the message, near the address of the sender's email. Sometimes it replaces the spam icon in the toolbar. And as we click on it an even bigger unsubscribe button appears.
On the mobile phone, you can tap on the three-dot menu on the top of the screen, if the sender offers an unsubscribe option then “Unsubscribe” appears in the menu.
Microsoft Outlook
You can also find some prominent unsubscribe links on Outlook.com and Outlook apps. On the web, it asks if we are getting too much email on top of the message and provides the option to unsubscribe right there.
Apple's iOS Mail App
There is a heading that says, "This message is from a mailing list. Unsubscribe" on the built-in iOS mail app, on top of your messages, which will send the request to unsubscribe to the sender.
Edison Mail
Edison Mail for iOS, macOS, and Android provides a very big unsubscribe link right on the top of the message (it also has a resubscribe button, in case you change your mind). It also has a Block option which can allow you to prevent seeing any message from an unwanted sender.
There’s also the fact that all the email apps don’t recognize the unsubscribe link the same way nor do they support the links with the same messages. Thankfully, if you are using the mobile apps that support multiple services (usually Outlook, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and IMAP accounts), you can unsubscribe across all the services.
Unsubscribe Services
Do you want to unsubscribe from a big junk of mail? Various services make this possible. The catch however is that you have to give these services full access permissions for your inbox so that it can reach the unsubscribe buttons of all the messages; this sometimes includes the contacts too.
Unroll.me
Available on the web or via a mobile app, Unrollme does a thorough checking of all such messages you probably don’t want to receive. An email from other services might also work.
Then you get a list of all the senders who seem suspicious; choose the unwanted ones, and Unroll.me does the rest. It has a feature called The Rollup where the selected mailings can be resubscribed, but they'll be sent to you via Unroll.me in a daily digest. This Rollup can be edited or deactivated at any time.
Although Unrollme is free, it requires full access to your data, that is your contacts and your messages. And although its parent company complains that it doesn’t leak or use any of that data unethically, there is absolutely no way we can be sure about it.
Unsubscriber by Polymail
Unsubscriber comes for $19, but that can be because it is not selling your data to other companies and making extra profit out of it. Created by Polymail, this site asks you to log in from your Google account and then allows you to unsubscribe in bulk.
Leave Me Alone
Leave Me Alone works in a different sort of way, here the money you spend is for credits ($2.50 for 50) which you apply for unsubscribing; Every credit means one sub. It supports Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, iCloud, AOL, and any IMAP accounts. You can also connect them all. The big teams also have an account option.
Clean Email
Clean Email is the costliest of the lot. It costs $29.99 per year, for five users it goes up to $49.99 per year or $99.99 annually for a full team. Its web interface takes in all the web-based email services, all the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IMAP accounts in a giant inbox that can be cleaned up in a few clicks, whether you're black-listing senders, bulk unsubscribing, or setting up filters and rules.
