A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber
Unsubscribe from email lists without compromising your privacy with Leave Me Alone 🙅
Did you know that in 2018, spam messages still account for 48.16% of all e-mail traffic worldwide? [source]
It’s easy to sign up to mailing lists, it’s much more difficult to find them in your inbox, and almost impossible to unsubscribe from them all easily.
We’ve all been there. Swamped with emails every day until you make a deal with yourself to find and click “unsubscribe” on all of the spam and subscription lists you receive. But, it’s time consuming and you need to focus on the important emails. So you toss them aside and the following week you have the same problem again.
In 2018, spam messages account for 48.16% of all e-mail traffic worldwide
Of course then there’s all the emails you receive from the services you’ve signed up to, who think it’s a good idea to have 25 different types of email notification for every possible interaction with your account or profile.
Not all mailing lists are bad by any means — I have several that I enjoy receiving and reading. I needed a service which showed me what I was subscribed to and allowed me to easily choose what to opt out of.
Unethical practices
Finding a service to unsubscribe from unwanted email lists was the easy part, I quickly found Unroll.me and Unsubscriber offering to help me for free (though Unsubscriber don’t support Gmail). Finding a service which didn’t sell all of my data for marketing purposes was where I struggled.
Both Unroll.me and Unsubscriber are able to offer their service for free because they make their money by collecting the metadata AND content of your emails and selling it. If you use Unroll.me you’re allowing them to share your personal information how they please with any ‘partners’ they choose. Mildly better, sign up to Unsubscriber and they’ll use your data to improve their products, services and advertising — still pretty ambiguous.
Unroll.me even made headlines last year when they sold user data to Uber. You can read about this on the New York Times, Life Hacker, Wired, The Guardian, and CNET.
Still, some changes have been made to protect customers. Since the introduction of GDPR in May 2018, Unroll.me no longer provides support to customers in the EU, as they’re unable to comply with the GDPR regulations. See TechCrunch, Forbes, and BBC News for further details.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel
Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of my data being exploited, I decided to build an ethical privacy-first email opt-out service called Leave Me Alone with my partner James.
Leave Me Alone lets you see all of your subscription emails in one place and automatically unsubscribe from them with a single click.
We’ll NEVER compromise your privacy. When we scan your inbox for subscriptions, we never store the content of any of your emails on our servers in any form, and any sensitive data is always encrypted at rest.
We are completely open and transparent about our service including;
- What permissions we request when you sign in using Google or Microsoft
- The data we store to power our statistics and algorithms
- How to revoke permissions and deactivate your account at any time
- Our commitment to you and our security features
How we make money
So that we can keep your data safe Leave Me Alone is a paid service.
We use credit-based pricing and charge a small amount for each unsubscribe so you only pay for what you unsubscribe from.
If you aren’t sure how many credits to buy then you can find out how many you might need by using the our estimator on the pricing page!
Clean your inbox
Using Leave Me Alone is super simple.
You can start using Leave Me Alone to clean your inbox of spam emails right now. Sign up at leavemealone.app, connect your accounts, and begin unsubscribing!
Or, you can learn more about Leave Me Alone vs. Unroll.Me here.
We hope you find our service useful and that it helps you take back control of your inbox. If you have any questions or feedback don’t hesitate to contact us on Twitter or via email at hello@leavemealone.app.
Enjoy your clean inbox!
