Best Alternatives to Unroll.me That Are Free and Safe to Use

Over the years, a lot of individuals have utilized the service unroll.me. When you provide it access to your email inbox, it searches through and finds every email newsletter and mailing list to which you are a subscriber. After that, you may select which ones to keep and mass unsubscribe from the remaining ones automatically.

It’s a service with several advantages for those of us whose email accounts are now more than ten years old. I am aware that throughout the years, I have been added to hundreds of mailing lists as a result of downloading an ebook or entering a contest.

The only issue is that it appears Unroll.me has been harvesting information about you from your email inbox in order to resell it to advertising. It appears that Uber purchased information from Slive Intelligence, the business that runs Unroll.me, on individuals who have Lyft receipts in their inboxes.

Now, here’s the deal. When Unroll.me first entered the market, it was a little firm managed by only two individuals. It was very safe to use back then. They only sold their service; they didn’t steal any additional information. However, Slice Intelligence eventually acquired Unroll.me and included it in their extensive line of market research applications, sometimes known as “information harvesting” apps.

The issue arises when you discover that, despite the fact that utilizing Unroll.me is typically a one-time event, relatively few users actually delete the program thereafter. Many install it, let it sift through their email, and remove them from a couple of dozen mailing groups, and then they forget about it. And that was just what it desired.

For an indeterminable number of users who have long since forgotten about it, Unroll.me languishes on the list of approved applications. You are unaware that it is gathering data to sell as it sits there.

Removing Unroll.me

It’s not too difficult to uninstall the app and stop it from accessing your account if, like many others, you now choose to do so. Finding the security and approved applications page on your email provider’s website should be your first step. The following links will take you to some frequently used services:

Google app authorization

Microsoft app permission

Yahoo-approved applications

AOL app authorization

As an aside, keep in mind that app permission screens are also present on the majority of social networks and many other services that provide APIs. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and all the others have their own sets. Although it has nothing to do with the Unroll.me issue, it’s a good idea to periodically check to see if there are any applications that you no longer use and should have your authorization revoked.

Find the Unroll.me app that has been granted access to your email account, then remove it. It will be instantly deleted from your email account as a result, and you will need to reauthorize it before using it once more.

The next step is to visit Unroll.me’s website and create an account. An extended menu containing the settings and logout choices may be found in the corner. One of the settings’ links is “delete my account,” located near the bottom. Although they don’t want you to click it by mistake, it’s rather little, and you may click it consciously. Please proceed to do so.

Once you remove that access, it’s likely that Unroll.me will send you an email requesting authorization to access your account again. For that last little pinch in the ass, feel free to unsubscribe from it as well.

Fortunately, there are many non-stealing alternatives to Unroll.me. Or, if they are, they do it in a far more covert manner.

1. Native Unsubscribes

First, do it yourself. This is technically one of the five options, but perhaps it shouldn’t be because it’s a default feature. A legal requirement is that emails on mailing lists have an unsubscribe link. If there isn’t one, it’s spam and has to be reported as such. This is a provision of the 2003 anti-spam laws that was enacted quite some time ago.

Any email you get with an unsubscribe link in it also has a lovely link up top in the subject line thanks to Gmail. Since they don’t want you to unsubscribe, sometimes that link might be tiny and hard to discover. Although it must be included by law, they won’t make it simple. The link appears at the top of Gmail. The subject line, sender, and unsubscribe are displayed.

You can follow the standard procedure for that business by clicking the unsubscribe link in the email or the one that Gmail inserts. Typically, you can change your email settings by signing into the website or by simply entering your email address in a form and selecting “remove me.” In general, it’s quite easy.

The main reason Unroll.me and similar services exist is that, once your address is old enough, you will start receiving tens or even hundreds of emails each week, and it can be a pain to read through and respond to each one individually. In addition, they allow you to monitor the mailing lists you are now on or were previously on but have deleted.

And now for the real options. Most likely, you’re looking for anything that can bulk delete mailing lists or keep track of what you remove. If so, you can look at these possibilities.

2. Gmail Unsubscribe

Not to be mistaken with utilizing Gmail’s built-in unsubscribe option, as I just explained. This Gmail plugin is available as an open-source project on GitHub. After installation, it searches your email for content appropriate for a newsletter. Next, it will add a report on the newsletter to a Google Sheet and attempt to unsubscribe.

By the way, the sheet is laid up really beautifully. There are several data columns in it. You may see the email status and see if it was successful in unsubscribing. It provides you with the email’s subject line and, if you haven’t erased it, a link to examine it.

It provides you with details about the email sender, including their email address and display name. If it was able to effectively remove you from the list, it naturally includes the unsubscribe link. Everything about this is excellent for analyzing data and monitoring how well it is performing its duties.

This script requires some configuration, but it doesn’t have a lot of definition. In order to delete each newsletter from your inbox, you must create a Gmail label (the default is Unsubscribe) and apply it to each one.

Using Gmail filters will make this process a little bit simpler. You may get a decent notion of how to set up a filter pretty simply by reading through the extensive content I’ve published about filters over here. You may configure a filter to unsubscribe from whatever you like, and the script will remove you from the list every time a new newsletter appears with that label.

3. Trove

Similar to a cross between Gmail and LinkedIn, Trove serves as a substitute for both email clients and relationship management systems. With a ton of extra tools for networking and relationship development, it lets you rank the importance of your relationships to other individuals and businesses. You have the ability to view and navigate your whole network of relationships and contacts, extend invitations to new members, and more.

In actuality, trove is most helpful for networking. It works really well to get some blogger outreach or influencer marketing started. I’ve made a few new acquaintances and taken advantage of guest writing chances thanks to it.

Most importantly, you may deprioritize or eliminate the “connections” that are simply mailing lists from the list that appears when it scans your connections. I take it that’s the feature you want? In addition, should you have any concerns regarding privacy, they offer a very clear and stringent privacy statement.

The ability to create connections is perhaps Trove’s greatest advantage, but newsletter management is also quite good, and individual use is completely free. They offer a business plan, but you may use it for free if you’re simply utilizing it for your own one-man operation or as a personal professional tool.

4. Cleanfox

Compared to the previously mentioned choices, Cleanfox offers a few advantages but a few disadvantages as well. It functions not just with Gmail but also with Outlook and other Microsoft email services, in addition to a number of other email providers.

Second, there are mobile versions of the software available on the Apple Software Store and Google Play Store. This can be really handy if you’re one of those people who always utilizes a mobile device instead of a desktop platform.

The software will scan your inbox and provide you a list of newsletters when you install and launch it. You have three options for each newsletter: keep subscribing but remove older emails from the sender, unsubscribe and remove older newsletters, or leave it as is.

It’s important to note that although Cleanfox says they never permanently destroy emails, in reality, they only move them to the trash bin, which gives you 30 days to retrieve them from services like Gmail. Thus, in a technical sense, they aren’t actually deleting, but they have still vanished.

The fact that this software plants a tree in Zambia, Africa, when you use it is maybe one of its more intriguing aspects. They collaborate with WeForest and promote the Green Cross. It’s a fairly charitable organization to help.

The main drawback is that Cleanfox could experience problems akin to those of Unroll.if you’re really worried about privacy, me. They are a component of FoxIntelligence, which gathers and de-identifies data for use in study groups. Depending on how important anonymous data aggregation is to you, this might or might not violate your privacy guidelines. You are welcome to research it on their website.

5. Clean Email

Clean Email resembles Unroll.me, although with more power. With its extensive email sorting, analyzing, and cleaning tools, it’s possible to achieve the coveted Inbox Zero in a matter of hours at most, from thousands of messages.

Upon initial execution, the script classifies everything in your email in an extremely general way. Messages will be sorted into groups like “drafts,” “old emails,” and “social network notifications.” If you’d like, you may apply a single selection and action to every item in the category.

After your first sort, you may apply actions more specifically by going into particular categories. Messages can be archived, deleted, blocked senders, tagged as spam, or moved to the trash. As an alternative, you may move them to folders, label or star them, add priority flags, or even designate them as unread. Naturally, bulk unsubscribing is a built-in function. Using whitelists, you may also shield certain communications or senders from mass actions that might otherwise be appropriate.