Unsubscribe Unwanted Emails Automatically With Leave Me Alone
Several years ago, Unroll.me promised to help users massively and free of charge to unsubscribe from email newsletters. It turned out that they were scanning user emails and sales data – for example, selling data from Lyft emails to Uber . That’s why you have to pay money to Leave Me Alone , an email unsubscribe service that doesn’t sell user data.
How it works
Leave Me Alone works like many email management tools: it has a dedicated inbox designed specifically for cleaning up mail. Specifically, it presents you with emails that you can unsubscribe from: newsletters, promotions, mailing lists, search alerts, etc. This includes emails that do not have an obvious unsubscribe link.
Instead of an archive button, there is a radio button next to each email. Click on the switch and Leave Me Alone will try to unfollow you. It does this without redirecting you to another web page or forcing you to fill out forms. It often, but not always, succeeds.
The Leave Me Alone inbox hides individual emails and merges all messages from a single sender. (This is sometimes oversimplified; all of my Indiegogo updates from multiple projects are grouped together, and I could only choose to log out of all or none of them.) You can filter and sort senders by recipient (if you’re using address forwarding) and by age. You can also look at the senders that most other users have unsubscribed from.
You cannot open an email in Leave Me Alone. You can’t even archive it. You can only unsubscribe. The point is to focus on one activity without being distracted. To use the service, you should flip through several pages of messages at once.
How much is it
When you test Leave Me Alone, you get five free cancellations. You can then buy more credits, ranging from 50 cancellations for $ 2.50 to 300 for $ 10.50. (If Leave Me Alone is unable to unsubscribe from you, you will receive your credit back.) Before purchasing unsubscribe credits, Leave Me Alone tells you how many emails you can unsubscribe from some so that you can buy the desired number of unsubscriptions. There is also a group plan priced at $ 6 per month per user.
If you have to unsubscribe from 50 mailing lists, this seems like a reasonable price to pay. More importantly, this is the only cost. Unlike Unroll.me, Leave Me Alone does not collect your data either.
What data does it collect
By using Leave Me Alone, you give the app permission to scan all of your email. This is a personal level of access, and Unroll.me has taught many to think more carefully about it. But in our estimation, Leave Me Alone does not abuse this privilege.
On its security page, the service lists the data it collects and uses: it collects “statistics” about which senders appear in most mailboxes and how recipients treat them: how often a particular sender is read or unsubscribed, or flagged as spam. Leave Me Alone states that it anonymizes and aggregates this data so that it is impossible to determine the habits or subscriptions of an individual user. You can opt out of this data collection in your settings. And at any time you can deactivate your account, which will delete all your data and revoke the service API access to your email.
Leave Me Alone co-founder James Ivings explained to Lifehacker via email that the service does not sell any of its user data, even anonymous. (Ivings is updating the terms of service to clarify this.) You are a customer, not a service.
Our verdict
The question then is whether it is worth unsubscribing from the $ 10.50 newsletters. If you find yourself actually wasting time “managing” your subscriptions, or you have to navigate to a new unsubscribe page every day, or you have to rummage through your spam folder looking for a lot of inappropriate emails, then this seems to be the case. costs.
But try it before you buy. You may find that after a few simple unsubscriptions, you don’t have much junk mail. You may find yourself still on hundreds of mailing lists based on your online purchases, donations, political contributions, Kickstarter promises, Kayak searches, service subscriptions, and memberships. If there is not so much from the subscription, then delete your account. But you can cling to that unsubscribe button as if you are troubleshooting bugs and getting rid of unnecessary inbox clutter in the future.