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Clean up that mess of an inbox with Unroll.me
This free Web service helps Gmail and Yahoo Mail users better manage the e-mail subscriptions that litter their inboxes.
If you are like me, you ignore most of the messages you receive from your various e-mail subscriptions -- the spam you asked for -- but you are loath to unsubscribe from any because every now and then one of these e-mails will include something important, interesting, or financially advantageous. With Unroll.me, you get a cleaner inbox and better way to manage your e-mail subscriptions. You'll still receive all of your e-mail subscriptions but in a much more digestible form.
Here's how it works:
Head to the Unroll.me site and choose Gmail/Google Apps or Yahoo Mail, click the box to agree to Unroll.me's terms and conditions, and hit the Go button. If you are currently logged into your account, Unroll.me will ask for permission to access it. Click the Allow button and select one of two options: get Unroll.me's unsubscribe feature along with its daily Rollup e-mail digest of your subscriptions or just get the unsubscribe tool with your active subscriptions still arriving individually and directly to your inbox as before.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)
After making your selection (I chose the former), Unroll.me scans your inbox for a few seconds while showing you a tutorial of how the service works. Click through the tutorial and then click the red View Rollup button. Next, you'll see a list of the subscriptions it found. For each, you can click the minus button to unsubscribe or the arrow button to have it be delivered directly to your inbox instead of getting rounded up in the daily Rollup. (For some subscriptions, you'll see a button with a gear icon instead of a minus sign; for these, you are taken to the unsubscribe page of the site of the subscription in question.) At the top of the screen, you can select a delivery time for your Rollup: Morning, Afternoon, or Evening.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)
It took a couple days for me to start receiving my Rollup, but now I get one each morning around 10. Though Unroll.me says you won't receive a Rollup message on days when you don't receive any e-mail subscriptions, so perhaps that was the reason for the delay.
At the top of each Rollup, it shows me any new subscriptions it found. These new arrivals will get added to my Rollup on the first of the following month, or I can choose to add all of them manually to my Rollup, keep all in my inbox, or edit each individually. Below, broken out by category, are the messages from subscriptions I had already added to my Rollup. For these, you'll see the sender's name and the subject line. Clicking on a message in your Rollup opens a page on the Unroll.me site in a new tab where you can read the message in its entirety.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)
If you find it a bit annoying to open such messages in a new tab, you can also view your e-mail subscriptions in a folder -- if you use Gmail. Unroll.me creates a folder for Gmail accounts that contains your subscriptions, though it took a day or two for this folder to appear after I signed up. Still, it's a convenient way to peruse your subscriptions.
If you decide you don't like Unroll.me, you can delete your account by clicking your account in the upper-right corner of the Unroll.me site, choosing Settings, and then hitting the Delete button. Before Unroll.me lets you out, it insists that you give them a reason. Thankfully, "It was me, not you" is an acceptable answer. For my main Gmail account, however, Unroll.me and I are still going strong.
