The estimated reading time for this post is 5 minutes
You’re at a store’s checkout counter buying something when you’re asked:
“What’s your email address?”
Do you hand over your email address along with your cash? You don’t want to miss out on exclusive coupons, discounts and sales! So you give your email address and the next thing you know your inbox gets fuller and fuller with news about deals you never use.
You’re not alone. Even people who record tv shows to be able to fast forward through commercials are lured to disclose their email address when offered the promise of exclusive email offers from their favorite stores.
When your inbox gets flooded with subscription emails, your important emails can get lost in an ocean of advertisements. Your email discount of “Buy One Get One Half Off Today Only!” doesn’t seem very important if it makes you miss an email from a prospective client.
Weeding through these emails and unsubscribing is one way of clearing out your inbox, but if you’ve subscribed to a lot of notices that method may take more time than you have.
Unroll.me is a free service designed to make the task of managing your email subscriptions easier. In just a few clicks you will have your inbox much better managed and be able to sift through your emails in a fraction of the time it took you to do that task yesterday.
Here’s a video showing how unroll.me works:
Unroll.me works with:
- Outlook.com (including Hotmail, MSN, & Windows Live)
- Gmail
- Google Apps
- Yahoo! Mail
- AOL Mail
- iCloud
How to Use Unroll.me
To get started go to the unroll.me website and click on Get Started Now.
Enter your email address in the box provided.
You’ll need to provide your email password so if you’re have a fear of sharing this information with others, then you won’t want to be availing yourself of this service.
After unroll.me connects with your email account it begins scanning your inbox to find subscriptions. If your inbox is pristine, this scan may not take very long. But if your inbox hasn’t been purged this century, you may have quite a few subscriptions and the scan could take a while to complete. You can sign up for an email notice to be alerted when the process is complete if you don’t want to hang around and wait.
After unroll.me has finished scanning your inbox to find your subscriptions, you find out how many subscriptions you actually have signed up for. I had a whopping 274 email subscriptions. Yikes! Time to clean up!
Unroll.me then gives you choices of what to do with your subscriptions:
1. Unsubscribe
2. Add them to your Daily Rollup
3. Leave them alone so the email subscriptions still appear separately in your inbox.
You will be shown a list of your subscriptions in alphabetical order. You can click on Add to rollup or unsubscribe.
You can also choose to keep important email subscriptions out of the Daily Rollup by checking neither option. Notifications from your workplace, bank, children’s school and social media accounts may deserve to have a place directly in your inbox instead of appearing in your Daily Rollup.
Unsubscribe
Unroll.me makes the process of unsubscribing about as easy as it can be. Instead of unsubscribing to each email notification individually, you can do a blanket unsubscription of multiple emails at once. Just a few clicks and you won’t get any more emails from companies you no longer want to contact you.
Good-bye unwanted emails!
[note]Also see, Clean Up Your Permissions! for an easy way of reviewing and revoking your social media permissions.[/note]
Daily Rollup
You likely will want to keep some favorite email notifications and this is where unroll.me comes in especially handy. Choose which emails you still want to receive and unroll.me will compile them into one daily email for you, called a Rollup. Instead of dozens of emails a day you’ll get just one, the Rollup. You can peruse your Rollup to find the emails you desire and then delete it, keeping your inbox under control.
If you realize later that you made a mistake and want to unsubscribe from email notifications, you can do that from within the Daily Rollup. You can also easily remove a subscription from within the Rollup so you receive the notification separately.
[note]For a very handy way to unsubscribe from junk mail arriving in your physical mailbox, check out PaperKarma: Saving the Earth One Step at a Time![/note]
Setting Up Your Daily Rollup
After your email account is scanned, you are shown a list of your email subscriptions with the option of adding the subscription to your Rollup or unsubscribing. You can quickly click through the list, choosing whether you want to hear from companies within your Daily Rollup or not at all.
Unroll.me not only lets you control which email notifications are in your Rollup, you can also set the time of day when you receive your Rollup, morning, afternoon or evening. You can edit the time later if you find your set time doesn’t work as well for you as you had expected.
You can also add an email subscription to your Rollup by forwarding the email to [email protected]. You can unsubscribe by forwarding a subscription email to [email protected].
If you change your mind or click on the wrong link by mistake, just edit your subscriptions from the unroll.me edit page.
Earning Your Unroll.me
After you have made 5 elections to add subscriptions to your Daily Rollup, you must earn the rest. You can choose to tweet about Daily Rollup or Like their Facebook page. You only have to do this once and it’s a small price to pay for the convenience of getting your email inbox under control.
Interesting Unroll.me Stats
Unroll.me shares their stats of the most unsubscribed and Rolled Up emails. The most unsubscribed was 1-800-Flowers and the most Rolled Up was Hulu. You can see more stats at the Unroll.me Awards Page.
Tech Tip
Note that The Wonder of Tech is considered by nearly all readers to be an essential subscription and should be neither added to the Rollup nor unsubscribed to. Experts agree that The Wonder of Tech should have its own spot in your email inbox.
Not a subscriber yet? Don’t worry, it’s not too late yet! Get a free subscription to The Wonder of Tech below to discover more fascinating tech news, tech tips, reviews and more:
[subscribe2]
Your Thoughts
Have you over-subscribed to emails? Do you like the idea of a Daily Rollup with one email notification each day? Do you like the idea of unsubscribing to emails from one place? Were you surprised by how many email subscriptions you have? Let us know in the Comments section below!
Hi Carolyn,
Wow, this is just what I would need, but I don’t think that this tool would work with my email as I’m using email secure server linked to my domain name.
I am always drowned in emails and it’s such a hassle. If it works with what I have then, I would love to try it. Do you know if it would?
Hi Sylviane, No, Unroll.me only works with the email services listed in the article. The good news though is that you can use Gmail with your domain name email. Both Adrienne and I use Gmail for our domain name email. That way we can send and receive emails using our domain name address using Gmail. Here’s a link to the Google website where you can set that up: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/
By using Gmail you can take advantage of a lot of the apps associated with Gmail such as Undo Send, Boomerang, Rapportive and Wise Stamp. You get the power of Gmail with the email address of your domain, the best of both worlds!
Thank you so much for that! I was looking for something similar. Glad to see in the screenshot that LinkedIn is one among them. I am tired of LinkedIn and no way I can opt out of it. Let me try with this
Hi Sunish, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! Yes, when I first started using Unroll.me I thought I wasn’t connecting properly to my email account because I had so few emails in my inbox. Then I saw my Rollup and realized that I just had a much clearer inbox. Very cool!
I hope you enjoy unroll.me, Sunish!
Wow! This sounds great Carolyn. I definitely have way too many subscriptions, and lately I’ve been manually removing myself from some of them. And I certainly have had that issue where so many emails from these subscriptions have hidden an important message, and I’ave spend hours deleting them. I even opened up a 3rd email account just to send subscriptions too. So yes, Unroll.me sure sounds like something I need to look into. Thanks for sharing this awesome tool.
Hi Carol, Yes, I bet many people have a New Year’s resolution of unsubscribing to unwanted emails. Yes, we can do that individually but it’s so much easier to do it with unroll.me. Plus I really like how unroll.me sends a daily Rollup that’s a digest of your subscriptions.
The first day after I signed up I thought my email wasn’t working because I got so few emails. Then I saw my Rollup and realized what happened. So cool!
I hope you enjoy unroll.me, Carol! And I’m so glad your fantastic blog is online again! Congratulations! :-bd
Hi Carolyn,
Certainly a handy tool, I think it’s the useful tool to find out all of your subscriptions and then you can easily manage them as well. Rollup feature is amazing, I’m going to use it but I know that I haven’t subscribed for too many subscriptions.
Hi Aahna, That’s great you don’t have a lot of subscriptions. Many people fall into the trap of giving over their email address for the promise of a discount that they never end up using. I’m glad you haven’t fallen into that trap very often, Aahna.
I never fully understood how the roll up worked (might be because I never opened any of the Unroll me emails – got to do that from now on). But, I have unsubscribed from ~650 subscriptions…thanks to Unroll me).
I don’t open many of my emails, especially these days (I really need to do something about…I had cleaned the inbox a while ago…but seems like I need to do a second round – lot of marketing newsletters. I am not opening them anyways, so why stay subscribed?).
I do have a question…when we use the rollup email digest feature, do we still receive the individual emails?
Anyways, thank you for the post, Carolyn 😀 Appreciate the help 🙂
Hi Jeevan, Wow, 650 emails! That must set a record for the most emails unsubscribed to! Yes, when the subscriptions go into your Rollup you no longer receive the individual emails.
Imagine if you received 649 fewer emails every day! How cool would that be? :-bd
The problem was whenever I signed up for something, I allowed them to send me emails; didn’t uncheck the email updates option (guess I didn’t know any better).
Plus, I kept on subscribing to marketing emails, knowing full well that I probably won’t have time to read them (and I didn’t!).
I still don’t open most of my emails (I don’t know why I stay subscribed! I have got to do second round of unsubscribing!)
Hi Jeevan, Even if you just use unroll.me to unsubscribe, it’s still worth a visit. You don’t have to sign up for a daily Rollup. You could just use the site to find all of your subscriptions and unsubscribe from them by clicking on the links. It couldn’t be easier! :-bd
I am really loving unroll.me. My roll up and unsubscribe grow every day and my inbox is much more clear. I showed it to my husband and he too is a fan. As I looked over his shoulder he was rolling up sites and he hesitated on my email!. I told him he can’t roll up his wife!
Hi Stephanie, Lol, you’re right, he can’t rollup his wife because you don’t have a subscription email. My husband could roll me up with his Wonder of Tech subscription, but I can’t imagine that he (or anyone else) would want to rollup The Wonder of Tech! :-bd
So glad you and your husband are enjoying unroll.me, Stephanie!
Hi Carolyn,
I was surprised by the topics you raise as an article.
To be honest, this unroll.me is a new thing for me. I’ve never heard about this before until I read this article. Because of that, I have not quite understand.
To understand this, there is no other way than I have to read this article over and over, I guess. Since I also received a lot of email subscriptions 🙂
Thanks for sharing this information, Carolyn :-bd
Hoping you have a splendid weekend.
Regards,
Nanda
Hi Nanda, I’m sorry you didn’t understand this article. I suggest you check out unroll.me and give it a try. You will quickly understand that it takes your email subscriptions and puts them in a list. You then can check unsubscribe or rollup to manage your inbox better.
After you give it a try please let me know if you have any questions.
Hi Carolyn,
Can you let me know which e-mail services it supports without any hassle?
Hi Gautham, Sure, here are the compatible email services for unroll.me:
That information was in the article but everyone was missing it so I reformatted the article to make that information more noticeable. Thanks so much for your helpful question!
Looks like a useful tool. Thanks for pointing it out.
Hi Marc, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! I’m so glad you’re enjoying Unroll.me. Enjoy your cleaner inbox!