1906. Easily Unsubscribe from Mailing Lists

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.