Over the years, I’ve subscribed to a number of
email lists that I’d prefer to no longer hear from. I get far too much
political and sales emails. I know I could unsubscribe from each manually, but
is there some tool I can use to take care of this for me?
We certainly understand your frustration here. During
the 2016 election cycle, Ken signed up for a bajillion email newsletters to
keep track of everything, and at this point, would prefer to hear nothing at
all about anything. He found a useful tool to clean out his inbox, and has
given it a try. It works!
First of all, understand that you never want to click
an Unsubscribe link in spam emails: Doing so just alerts the sender that
there’s a human at the receiving end of the email. For spam, you’re better off
using spam filtering in your email client to rid your inbox of the messages.
On the other hand, for legitimate emails that you’d
just prefer to no longer receive, you can and should click the Unsubscribe link
to remove yourself from the distribution list. If you have just a few, you can
do this manually. If you’ve gone overboard, however, you may need some help
automating this.
We’ve run across several “unsubscribe” services over
the years, but a new one, available for free at getunsubscriber.com, works the
best of any we’ve seen with the least intrusion into your life.
Once you sign up at getunsubscriber.com, you grant the
site access to your email inbox; it creates a new folder named Unsubscribe. For
any email list you’d like to unsubscribe from, drag an email to the Unsubscribe
folder, and the service takes care of the rest. That’s it. You can re-subscribe
if you want, but in general, the service removes you from the email list.
Unsubscriber works with pretty much any of the most
popular email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Office365, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo), but
there’s a down side, and it’s a big one: You have to give the service access to
your email inbox. If you’re not comfortable with that, you won’t want to use
the service. On the other hand, they promise (really) that they won’t look at
any folder except the Unsubscribe folder. This is a tough decision, but one
you’ll need to make. Ken bought into it, and believes that the service is
honest.
If you find that you need help managing all your email
newsletters, give Unsubscriber a try by visiting GetUnsubscriber.com. It
definitely does what it sets out to do: You just need to determine if the
service is worth the trust you must grant it.
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