Unsubscribe From Spam Lists With This Chrome Extension

All my email addresses (school, personal, spam and work) in Gmail and Outlook currently have 23,754 unread messages. This does not mean that I ignore important emails related to my work, education, or personal activities. It just means these posts are harder to find because I’m inundated with junk. In an attempt to get organized, I added the Trimbox extension to my Chrome browsers to clean out my Gmail inboxes.

I’ll admit, I was nervous about using a third party app to hack all my stupid email, but it worked great.

What is Trimbox?

Trimbox is a Chrome extension that allows you to, in their words, “unsubscribe from emails with one click.” There are many similar services on the market, but I have heard that not all of them work. I don’t personally know anyone who uses Trimbox, but its landing page has positive reviews such as “The most useful extension ever!” and “I feel free!!” Additionally, promotional materials highlight the app’s refusal to share any user data and boast of its certification from Google’s privacy team. At the moment I’m so annoyed by the amount of unwanted emails I receive that I would be willing to sell my data to the devil himself, but that wasn’t necessary. All I had to do was click “Get Trimbox.”

This opened my inbox and asked me to grant the extension permission to “view, edit, create, or change [my] email settings and filters in Gmail” and “read, compose, and send emails from [my] Gmail.” account.” An additional feature of Trimbox is an AI-powered auto-draft feature that will compose reply emails for you, but I didn’t need that so I didn’t give the app permission to compose or send emails.

Trimbox’s privacy policy states that all email data it accesses is stored on your device and is permanently deleted when you uninstall the app. Any data it has access to is only used for the functions you expect from Trimbox. However, it will collect and feed data to OpenAI when using a Chrome extension with auto-draft functionality to train AI models. This feature appears to be the least privacy-friendly of all, so if you want to keep your email data local when using Trimbox, disable it.

I use separate Chrome browsers for work, school and personal use, with the respective Gmail logged in as a user in all three, so I started with work email only to discover that I needed admin permission to use the app. Keep this in mind if you’re trying to clean up your work account. This wasn’t a big deal for me because most of my spam messages come through my personal account, but I wanted to test the app before using it there, so I installed it in my school browser instead. In a matter of seconds, I was able to not only unsubscribe from mailing lists detected by the extension, but also automatically delete all of their old emails sent to me.

How Trimbox works

Trimbox places a small turquoise icon next to the sender of every email that the app suspects is on the mailing list. Tapping the icon once will instantly unsubscribe, but a small pop-up will appear for a few seconds asking you to delete any old messages while you wait.

I did this for three senders defined as mailing lists and then checked the Trash folder. There they were all waiting to be removed from the deleted folder once and for all. I clicked “delete all” and the number of unread emails dropped by 207—all from three senders.

What’s nice about this service is that it doesn’t perform bulk deletion on its own. This allows you to (easily) choose which senders you unfollow, as well as whether you get rid of all their past messages. This is great because there are mailing lists I still want to participate in and some old emails I still want to keep.

Three things to remember about Trimbox

Unlike its competitors, this app actually works, but you have to pay for it. The first thing to keep in mind is that you can’t unsubscribe and delete it for free forever – you’ll end up being asked to pay either $39.99 per year or $19.99 per month. Depending on how annoying your inbox is, it might be worth it.

My other complaint is that it is difficult to do very quickly due to the pop-ups themselves. They cover up the other turquoise icons and prevent you from rushing the process.

Lastly, my inbox automatically sorts “promotions” and “updates” so most of the turquoise icons I encountered were in sub-inboxes that are already hidden, which doesn’t stop me from using it daily and not sending push notifications to my home screen. Most of my spam actually comes from advertisers who clog up my main inbox and send me annoying push notifications. However, very few of them are based on mailing lists and therefore do not have a turquoise icon that would make them easier to delete in bulk.

If you’re considering paying for a subscription, take note of which of your unread messages are actually flagged by the extension for deletion, and make sure that most of your annoying unread messages are actually compatible with the app’s features.