Unsubscribe! How to Take Yourself Off Email Lists
Yes, you can make unsolicited and unwanted email stop bothering you.
Chances are that your inbox is a mix of important messages, Amazon Prime shipping notices, bill alerts, and harmless email that's easy to ignore.
But spam creeps in. Sometimes that’s your own fault— you enter your email address to win that contest! — and sometimes others do it for you. Thanks for that blank-of-the-month-club email, mom.
Luckily, there are easy ways to kill unwanted email that don’t involve 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 disguised as a non-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 the entire thing.)
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.
It’s a little harder on mobile. In the Gmail app for iOS, the easiest option is to block the sender; tap the three dots on the top-right and select Block. On Android, tap the vertical three-dot menu; if the sender offers an easy unsubscribe option, the word Unsubscribe appears on the menu.
Microsoft Outlook
Prominent unsubscribe links are also found on Outlook.com and the Outlook apps. 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
Email (aka Edison Mail) for iOS and Android shows a large Unsubscribe button at the top of a message and an animation to indicate the request is placed.
What’s interesting is that looking at the same messages with Gmail on the desktop and mobile, Email, and other apps with a more prominent unsub option shows that they don’t all recognize the links the same way, nor do they 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. As Robert Heinlein told us, TANSTAAFL.
Unsubscriber
This is as simple as it gets. Put your email address in at GetUnsubscriber.com, and the service sticks an Unsubscriber folder/label in your inbox. Drag messages you no longer want into that folder. Unsubscriber will filter messages out until the unsub request goes through. It works with any email provider, though the site includes quick links for Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail, and Aol.
It’s free to use, but the service states up front: “We collect and share certain information about non-personal email messages (e.g., commercial emails).”
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 that lets you 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 it can to sell market research.
Read more: “Even in 2019, People Believe Too Many Tech Myths”
Originally published at www.pcmag.com.
