Inbox Out of Control? Unroll.me Might Be Able to Help

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Inbox Out of Control? Unroll.me Might Be Able to Help

I get such a ridiculous amount of email every day, and much of it I don’t even need or want to read. I use Gmail, so spam is largely kept under control, but subscriptions and email lists seem to constantly pile up; unsubscribing is not always successful. I’ve been trying Unroll.me for the past week, and I think it’s helping.

Allow me to digress for a moment. Email has become a somewhat stressful subject for me; I usually wake up to several hundred each morning, and if I try to “turn off” for a few hours during the day, I can generally figure that there will be 50-60 for every hour that I wasn’t available. No, these aren’t all important emails, but they still have to be sifted through, and that becomes just one more thing I need to do when I have other things that I need to be doing.

Unroll.me is a free service that scans Outlook.com (including Hotmail, MSN, & Windows Live), Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and iCloud email accounts. I have it set to scan my Gear Diary email account, and I am finding it to be a lifesaver.

You have to authorize the service to access your email, but once that is done, it will scan through your subscriptions and then give you a list; I had 637 the first time it scanned me, and in the last week it has found 38 more. It’s no wonder I am having so much trouble keeping my inbox under control!

Of the 650+ email subscriptions I receive, I have unsubscribed from 258.

Inbox Out of Control? Unroll.me Might Be Able to Help

Here’s how that works:

Unroll.me unsubscribes you by following a sender’s unsubscribe instructions 24 hours after you’ve unsubscribed. As a backup, we automatically trash all future emails you’ll receive from that sender. This is to ensure that if the unsubscribe request fails for some reason, you’ll still never receive an email from that sender. See more info here.

Email that I want to keep receiving in my inbox is still delivering directly to my inbox, but there is another time-saving Unroll.me feature for emails I don’t want or need to see right away,  even though they are emails that I still want to keep receiving: the Rollup.

Inbox Out of Control? Unroll.me Might Be Able to Help

 The Rollup is a digest that gives you an overview of all the subscriptions you receive each day. The Rollup will keep your inbox clean by organizing the subscriptions you receive into a daily digestible email.
The subscriptions you include in your Rollup will no longer be sent to your inbox. Rather, they are moved to the “Unroll.me” folder in your email client and can be found there at any time.

I like the Rollup because it puts all of my non-urgent emails into a single digest; I can check it at my leisure — even if it is a few days later. I do have to remember to clean out the Unroll.me folder that’s now in my Gmail account, but that’s an easy once a week job.

Unroll.me isn’t perfect, but (at least for now) it is a free, easy to set up way to manage an inbox that might otherwise seem out of control. I know that I don’t feel quite as apprehensive about going a few hours without checking my email now, and that is saying something!

You can read the Unroll.me FAQ here and sign up here.

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About the Author

Judie Lipsett Stanford
Judie is the co-owner and Editor-in-Chief of Gear Diary, which she founded in September 2006. She got her start in 1999 writing software reviews at the now-defunct smaller.com; from mid-2000 through 2006, she wrote hardware reviews for and co-edited at The Gadgeteer. A recipient of the Sigma Kappa Colby Award for Technology, Judie has written for or been profiled by nationally known sites and magazines, and she has served on multiple industry hardware and software award panels. She is best known for her device-agnostic approach, enjoyment of exploring tech, gadgets, and gear, and her deep-diving, jargon-free reviews.

3 Comments on "Inbox Out of Control? Unroll.me Might Be Able to Help"

  1. Thanks for this tip… I’m trying it out now!

  2. I signed up both of my main accounts when I saw your Facebook post. I’m impressed.
    I just got my first “Rollups” of various emails that would have individually filled my inbox. All of them in a nice email with great formatting… I LOVE it.

    • I am really happy with it, too! I just hope that it stays free … or if/when they start charging, they make it something reasonable ($24/year maybe)

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