Your mailbox is probably full of important messages, sales and newsletters. Every now and then something you didn’t sign up for gets involved and it ends up being a nightmare to deal with. Luckily there are a few ways you can clean up your email inbox.
Unsubscribe Links
The easiest way to get of email lists is to use the unsubscribe feature. The link is usually at the bottom of the mail in small type.
Gmail makes it easy to unsubscribe from a desktop. If it notices an unsubscribe link on a newsletter it creates it’s own at the top of the message. It is a little more difficult on mobile. On iOS the only option is to mark it as spam and on Android, if you mark it as spam it will ask if you’d rather unsubscribe.
Obvious links are easily found on Outlook.com and Outlook apps. On the web portal, it will say “getting too much email? Unsubscribe”.
On the built-in iOS mail app, look for a message saying “This message is from a mailing list. Unsubscribe”
Unsubscribe Services
Want to just unsubscribe in a big batch? A few services make that possible. The only downside is that they need access to your entire mailbox.
Unsubscriber
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, and 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.
Unroll.me
Available on the web, or via an iOS app, Unroll.me looks into the heart of your Outlook.com, Gmail/GSuite, Yahoo Mail, and AOL 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 so you can re-subscribe to select mailings, but they’ll get funnelled to you via Unroll.me in a daily digest. You can edit (or deactivate) The Rollup any time.
Unlistr
There is no web-based interface; Unlistr has a free Android app and a $20 add-on for Outlook (the one in Office, not Outlook.com). You sign up using your email account—any that supports IMAP/POP accounts, plus Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook.com), and others. Essentially, if you know the incoming and outgoing server settings, it should work. You get a list of senders to unsubscribe from all at once.
Unlistr does all its processing locally on your smartphone, keeps messages encrypted, and avoids trying to un-sub you from known spammers so you won’t get more.
This article was based on the original at PCMag.com