An Early Christmas Gift For Anyone With Too Many Emails

My wife always accuses me of not telling her about all of the great apps and tech that I come across. It’s probably true, but I don’t want to fill up her phone with a bunch of stuff that she may or may not find useful. It’s my job to try out new things and share the best with the teachers I work with, not hers.

Well, the tables have turned! She told me about an amazing app that she just loved and has saved her a lot of hassle and time dealing with the LOADS of email offers that clutter up inboxes of us all on a daily basis. I thought that it was easy enough in Gmail to just choose all of the unread messages, scan through them, uncheck those that I might want to maybe look at, and delete the rest. I put off giving the app a try for a few weeks. It was a mistake. I was wrong.

Once I tried her suggested app, it liberated the amount of “Bacon” (not really spam, just email offers that at one time I signed up for) in my personal email account to the point that I actually didn’t DREAD logging in to see the one or two emails that I wanted to read. Honestly, I went from 50-70 emails a day down to just a handful.

So, THANK YOU Kelly for introducing me to Unroll.Me!

Here’s how it works. Sign up for this FREE service at https://unroll.me, or download their app for iOS (Sorry Android folks… Use the web interface or hold out for the app). Then, add one or many email addresses to your Unroll.Me account – most major email platforms are supported. I started with just my personal Gmail account. Then, Unroll.Me scans your inbox(es) for any potential messages and then prompts you to do one of three things with those messages:

• Unsubscribe from the source (and the unsubscribe actually works!)
• Keep messages from that source in your inbox, and continue to receive them as usual
• Or, choose to “Roll Up” messages from that source into one daily digest email from Unroll.Me where you can view all of your rolled up messages for the day.

So, instead of 50 or so messages to sort through each day, you have one message with all of your offers that is easy to quickly scan through. The roll up includes a thumbnail of the message with the title, so you can easily tell what the content is. You can open any offers in the roll up with a click, or just delete the one roll up message and be done. The original email of any messages that you choose to roll up will be sent to an Unroll.Me folder in your email client.

It took a day or two for the volume of email coming in to go down, and every few days I open the app back up to “train” it for additional offers and messages that were not in the prior groups. But, just to show you how much this app has reduced my inbox clutter, take a look at the number of messages I’ve taken care of with this service:

Over 120 different senders. Almost 70 I’ve unsubscribed to. Only 5 that I actually want to see individually. The remaining 55 rolled up into a single daily message.

Bliss. Pure bliss. And I hope that you can start your New Year with the same feeling with all of your email clutter. Again, a big thank you to my brilliant wife for sharing this with me!

Now, I just need to add my 14 other email accounts and start training them as well… First World problems. Merry Christmas to you all!