Communications

Unroll.me

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Quickly unsubscribe from unwanted email subscriptions

[UPDATE 4/26/17: Unroll.me has been taken to task for selling anonymized email data. Here’s the relevant excerpt from their terms of service:

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We also collect non-personal information — data in a form that does not permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, sell and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. For example, when you use our services, we may collect data from and about the ‘commercial electronic mail messages’ and ‘transactional or relationship messages’ (as such terms are defined in the CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7702 et. seq.)) that are sent to your email accounts.
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In other words, Unroll.me scans your email, strips out identifying information and sells it to others. Lots of companies do this. Read this NY Times article: Unroll.me Service Faces Backlash Over a Widespread Practice: Selling User Data.

You must decide whether or not you want spam filters, or other free services reading your email. If you decide you don’t you should not take a look at the permission settings on your browser.]

I’m on a lot of mailing lists that I did not subscribe to. And every day I get added to a half dozen or more unwanted lists. These spamlike subscriptions are usually from PR flaks who want me to write about their clients. It’s almost always for things I don’t care about (like an insurance company announcing the appointment of a new regional vice president). It’s annoying to sort through this garbage in order to find email I care about.

Then I discovered Unroll.me, a free mailing list management service that works with Gmail, Google Apps, and Yahoo Mail. It does a great (but not perfect) job of finding the mailing lists you are subscribed to and presenting them as a list, allowing you to instantly unsubscribe to them by clicking with your mouse. As of today, I have used Unroll.me to unsubscribe to 1,601 mailing lists. It’s a dream come true.

What about the mailing lists that I actually signed up for and like? Unroll.me is great for dealing with those, too. Instead of receiving the newsletters one-at-a-time in my inbox, I’ve added my 114 mailing list subscriptions to a “Rollup.” This is a daily digest prepared by Unroll.me that contains email from the subscriptions I care about (my bank, my health insurance provider, Audible.com, my kids’ school, James Altucher’s essays, etc.) You can click on any of the items in the Rollup email to see the full email.

Here’s what the Rollup looks like:

rollup

Unroll.me is something I would happily pay money for. It is free, but you need to pay with a tweet or a Facebook like.

-- Mark Frauenfelder 03/26/15

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