Getting rid of spammy newsletters is now as easy as swiping left.
Getting rid of spammy newsletters is now as easy as swiping left.

I love newsletters. Not only do they bring all the top news right into my inbox for reading anywhere, but there’s also a newsletter for just about every one of my niche interests. I subscribe to newsletters on everything from the business of podcasting to a roundup of what New York Times writers are reading. And of course, I get all the GeekWire newsletters.

Unroll.me LogoBut sometimes all those newsletters can be overwhelming. And combined with all the spammy emails from any place I’ve bought something online or any free app I’ve signed up for, I can see why some people are wishing email would just die. Luckily, Unroll.me lets you combine all your newsletters into one email, called the “Rollup,” and keeps the other emails from ever hitting your inbox.

To get started, you need to give permission for Unroll.me to comb through your emails to find everything to which you’re subscribed. Then, you simply go through and choose which subscriptions you want to keep coming to your inbox, which you want wrapped up in the daily Rollup, and which you never want to see in your inbox again. That means you don’t have to find the barely legible “Unsubscribe” link in 6-point font buried at the bottom of your emails.

With Unroll.me’s new iOS app, sorting those emails is now a lot easier. Instead of checking boxes or dragging messages, you simply swipe messages away. Much like Tinder, you swipe right to mark emails that you like and swipe left on emails you never want to see again. For sending things to your Rollup, just swipe up.

The app also lets you quickly go through older Rollups, so you don't even have to open your email app to find all your favorite newsletters all in one spot. 
The app also lets you quickly go through older Rollups, so you don’t even have to open your email app to find all your favorite newsletters all in one spot.

With the app, I was able to triage the 231 email subscriptions in my inbox in under 10 minutes. What really helped was the ability to get a small preview of each email before I had to decide whether to banish its sender forever.

Even if I do decide to “unsubscribe” from some emails, getting them back isn’t hard. While the company calls it unsubscribing, Unroll.me doesn’t actually go through the unsubscribing process for each email; instead, it just sends emails from certain senders directly to your archive or a special Rollup folder.

That means you can easily go into Unroll.me to resubscribe to emails or add them to your Rollup later. And emails still show up in search, so you can just search for a coupon if you’re shopping online without being bombarded by them each day.

The system isn’t perfect though. Some sites, like Amazon, send emails from multiple address, so you’ll see some duplicate items. (While this is annoying when sorting your emails, this is actually a good thing; you wouldn’t want to banish your purchase confirmation emails from your inbox, but you may not want to see the daily deals emails anymore.)

There’s also no way to mark an email from a sender that you don’t want to see anymore if Unroll.me doesn’t recognize it as an unsubscribable email. I have an old college acquaintance who frequently sends out mass email updates about his latest pet projects, but Unroll.me doesn’t let me block them from my inbox. While I could probably just reach out to him and ask him to stop updating me, it’d be nice to add any sender to my daily Rollup.

Unroll.me is a free service and the iOS app is free as well. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can sign up for Unroll.me on the web to start reducing your inbox clutter.

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