How to Unsubscribe From Unwanted Email

Chances are, your email inbox is a mix of important messages, shipping notices, bill alerts, newsletters you never read, and other easy-to-ignore missives.

But spam creeps in. Sometimes you do it yourself—enter your email address to win that contest!—and sometimes others do it for you. Luckily, there are easy ways to kill unwanted emails, and they never involved sending invective-filled rants to the sender. (Don’t do that. It won’t help.)

Unsubscribe Links Made Easy

The cleanest way to get off a list is to use the built-in unsubscribe option. That link is generally buried at the bottom of the message, in tiny type or made to not even look like a link, all the better to keep you subscribed. Many web-based or app-based email options try to make it easy.

(The chance that the unsubscribe link is a trick—a way to confirm to a spammer that you are a real person—is low. But be smart about it; if something looks fishy in any message, just mark the whole thing as spam and delete it.)

Google Gmail

Gmail makes it easy to unsubscribe on the desktop. Whenever it notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender’s email. In fact, sometimes it appears in place of the Spam icon in the toolbar. Click it and a giant Unsubscribe button appears.

A Gmail unsub link
(Credit: Google)

On mobile, tap the three-dot menu up top; if the sender offers an easy unsubscribe option, the word Unsubscribe will appear on the menu.

Microsoft Outlook

(Credit: PCMag)

Prominent unsubscribe links are also found on Outlook.com and the Outlook apps(Opens in a new window) as well. On the web, it says “Getting too much email? Unsubscribe” at the top of a supported message.

Apple’s iOS Mail App

On the built-in iOS Mail app, look for a banner reading “This message is from a mailing list. Unsubscribe” atop your messages, which will email the sender with the unsub request.

Edison Mail

Edison Mail(Opens in a new window) for iOS(Opens in a new window), macOS, and Android(Opens in a new window) shows a large Unsubscribe button at the top of a message (with a Resubscribe button if you change your mind). Edison Mail also offers a Block option on messages, so you never have to see anything from the sender ever again.

(Credit: Edison Mail)

What’s interesting is that not all email apps recognize unsubscribe links the same way, or support them within the same messages. Thankfully, when you’re on the mobile apps that support multiple services (usually Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, and IMAP accounts), you can unsubscribe across all the services.

Unsubscribe Services

Want to unsubscribe from mail in a big batch? Several services make it possible. The downside is that you have to give these services complete access to your inbox for them to find messages with an unsubscribe option; sometimes that includes access to your contacts or even your calendar. Like Heinlein said: TANSTAAFL(Opens in a new window).

SaneBox

Years ago we gave SaneBox a perfect 5-star score in a review that said, among other superlatives, that “SaneBox is the best thing that has happened to email since email’s invention.” That Editors’ Choice pick stands—SaneBox hasn’t even upped its prices in the intervening years.

SaneBox uses some artificial intelligence to improve the contents of your inbox. The video above shows how you can train the your inbox to keep your efficiency up.

But how do you use it to clean up all that unwanted email? The AI takes care of some of that, but whatever sneaks through can be dragged to a folder called SaneBlackhole, which has the gravitational pull to make sure nothing from that sender ever bothers you again.

Unroll.me

Available on the web(Opens in a new window) or via a mobile app(Opens in a new window), Unroll.me looks into the heart of your Outlook.com/Hotmail/Live, Gmail/Google Workspace, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, and Aol email account to locate messages you probably don’t want. You can also try an email address from another service.

In return, you get a list of all the senders you could nix; pick the ones you don’t want, and Unroll.me does the rest. It also offers a service called The Rollup so you can re-subscribe to select mailings, which get funneled to you via Unroll.me in a daily digest. Edit (or deactivate) The Rollup any time.

Unroll.me is free, but it does want full access to your messages and contacts. Its parent company claims that it ignores personal email and anonymizes the messages it sees, but it’s using all of the data(Opens in a new window) to sell market research in the background even after you stop actively using it, since you’ll probably forget about it once it does what you wanted.

Unsubscriber by Polymail

(Credit: PCMag)

Unsubscriber(Opens in a new window) is from Polymail(Opens in a new window)—one of our 20 Tools for More Productive Email—the site asks you to log in. You can do that via your Google or Microsoft account, after which Polymail has access to all your contacts, mail, and even your calendar, or make your own login via another email address. It then offers up an interface to your email on Polymail itself, complete with bulk unsubscribe tools.

Leave Me Alone

Leave Me Alone’s Inbox Shield
(Credit: Leave Me Alone)

Leave Me Alone(Opens in a new window) supports Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, iCloud, Aol, and any IMAP accounts. Connect them all. There’s also offer an account option for big teams. Do a one-off payment of $7, which gives seven days of access to quickly get an entire inbox (for one account) under control. Or pay $9 or $16 a month for full control, depending on what level of control is needed. Leave Me Alone also offers roll-up email digest of some of the messages you don’t want to miss out on, plus an Inbox Shield screener service to look at all the messages before they arrive.

Clean Email

(Credit: Clean Email)

A single account at Clean Email(Opens in a new window) is $29.99 per year or you can do up to five users for $49.99 per year or $99.99 annually for a full team (there are more expensive monthly options starting at $9.99). It claims to “clean” 5 million emails per day. It offers a web interface that aggregates all the web-based email services (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, iCloud, IMAP accounts) in one big inbox that can be cleaned up in a few clicks, whether you’re bulk unsubbing, black-listing senders, or setting up filters and rules. It does have a trial so you can try it for free. It claims it doesn’t analyze and sell data like Unroll.me.

If the options above all seem either fishy, not powerful enough, or too expensive there are other possibilities you can check out like Cleanfox(Opens in a new window), unlistr (Opens in a new window)(for Outlook only), and Mailstrom(Opens in a new window). All have a free option, or at least a free trial, to give them a try.