Long ago, after a few years of using email, I decided I needed a way to make my inbox more organized. I was tired of restaurant promos having the same importance as critical account alerts.
The solution was a service called Unroll.me, which rolls up your less-important emails into a daily digest. I’ve been using the service since 2015, and I still appreciate what it does for me.
Why I turned to Unroll.me
As annoying as email can be, it’s important to keep your inbox tidy. Because your email address is used to log into nearly all online accounts, it’s where you receive security and other important updates. If you have to sift through hundreds of subscription emails every time you open your inbox, you’re much more likely to miss something important.
Online attackers know this. In my Amazon account breach fiasco earlier this year, the attacker subscribed to a bunch of garbage using my wife’s email address. This was to flood her inbox so she wouldn’t see the emails about the fraudulent purchase.
In my early days of using email, my initial solution to this problem was to create an email filter for any message that contained the word “unsubscribe”. Since legitimate subscription emails must include a link to unsubscribe, I figured this was an easy method to filter subscription messages.
But it wasn’t that simple, because plenty of emails I wanted to see had that word at the bottom. It also has the problem of shoving all the low-priority emails into another folder, which I never want to open and deal with.
Gmail’s auto-sorting into tabs like Promotions and Social might have been a solution. But I’ve always preferred to have unread emails at the top of my inbox, and that option isn’t compatible with sorting tabs. Thus, I gave a third-party service a try.
What Unroll.me offers
Unroll.me is a simple tool to help wrangle your email subscriptions. It’s available for Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook (web), iCloud, and AOL mail accounts.
After connecting it to your account, start by visiting the Inbox tab of the service. This shows all the automated senders you receive mail from, and provides three actions for each subscription: Keep, Block, or Rollup.
Keep leaves the email in your inbox as normal. Block prevents the email from reaching your inbox. Rollup is the most interesting and useful: it makes the email skip your inbox, then adds it to a daily digest. This lets you collect the subscription emails you want to see but don’t want clogging up your inbox.
Emails that you roll up are sent to the Unroll.me label in your email.
For companies that send emails from multiple addresses, you can apply one action for them all or pick individually. For instance, you might block promotional offers from an airline (deals@airline.com) while keeping critical flight updates (info@airline.com) in your inbox.
Handling your unroll actions
Once you’ve made decisions on how to handle each email source, the Subscriptions tab lets you manage them. There’s a section for each of the three actions, and you can change the action for any email sender as often as you like.
Don’t miss the search bar at the top, which comes in handy if you have lots of subscriptions. I find the default domain sorting useful, but you can sort by date at the top-right if you prefer.
The last tab on the left sidebar is Rollup, which collects all your rolled-up emails. Here, you can quickly scroll through the subject lines to see if there’s anything you want to open, then interact with the mail like you would in your inbox. You don’t have to mark them all as read, making it quick to check.
It’s worth checking the Settings gear at the top-right to configure the few options Unroll.me offers. You can choose to receive your rollup in the morning, afternoon, or evening. I recommend keeping the email notification toggle for New Rollup enabled; this sends an email that acts as a reminder to check your rollup for the day.
Unroll.me supports multiple inboxes; add more at the top-right if you want to use it on more than one account.
Why I love Unroll.me
Unroll.me solved the issues I had with my inbox in a simple but effective way.
When an email hits my inbox, I know it’s one I want to see. I can keep a short list of unread emails at the top of my inbox to use as a task list of matters I need to look at. Then each day, I take a few minutes to review my rollup for any sales or other low-priority items I don’t want filling up my inbox but still want to see.
And it’s easy to move senders around if I change my mind. When I notice I’ve been seeing a lot from a sender that I never open, I roll it up. After a while, if I never open something in the rollup, I block that sender.
I don’t have to mess around with Gmail filters or do anything manually—controlling my inbox is easy.
The biggest potential concern: privacy
It’s wise to evaluate any app that you give access to your email, given how sensitive its contents are. In 2017, Unroll.me came under fire for privacy concerns. Years ago, the company didn’t make it clear how it used your emails for marketing purposes. Now, it’s more specific.
Unroll.me’s Your Data page explains that the service collects information from your transactional emails, like receipts, travel booking confirmations, and shipping updates. The company behind Unroll.me (NielsenIQ) is a consumer data firm that uses your information to influence advertising decisions. It also shares data about your commercial emails with its clients.
The page states that the service isn’t interested in your personal emails; you have to determine if you trust that. I’ve searched my Unroll.me inbox for contact names, and nothing shows up, so I imagine it only checks for emails that contain “unsubscribe” or similar to know what’s automated. I recommend reading Unroll.me’s privacy policy to make sure you’re OK with what it does.
If you’re using a common email service like Gmail or Yahoo, data from your email is already being sold to advertisers. I’m OK with the trade-off, but I know many won’t be. Clean Email is an alternative that claims to be privacy-friendly, but I haven’t used it and thus can’t speak to it.
Other small concerns to be aware of
Like any service, Unroll.me isn’t perfect. Be aware that using the Block action doesn’t unsubscribe you from the email—this was news to me, since this button was called Unsubscribe until recently.
Instead, it moves the email to a sub-label under the Unroll.me label mentioned earlier. This is what allows you to quickly change a subscription from Blocked to another status. If you’re looking to mass-unsubscribe from emails, you’ll need another service.
When you start using Unroll.me, you should pay extra attention to your inbox and rollups until you get used to it. There were a few times early on where I almost missed an important email because I didn’t realize I had added it to the rollup.
Otherwise, I’ve been randomly signed out of my Unroll.me account a few times, but that’s minor. It’s been a smooth experience overall.
You can do what Unroll.me does on your own, but it’s clunky and takes a lot of time. I’ve gotten so used to it being part of my email experience, and I appreciate that quick moment of going through my rollup every day.
If you don’t need to remove a bunch of subscriptions but also can’t stand the chaos in your inbox, give Unroll.me a try. I’ve found it strikes a great balance where your inbox holds the important messages, without hiding or trashing the mail you’re OK with quickly scanning over.