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Chances are, your email inbox is a mix of important messages, shipping notices, bill alerts, newsletters you never read, and other easy-to-ignore missives.
But spam creeps in. Sometimes you do it yourself—enter your email address to win that contest!—and sometimes others do it for you. Luckily, there are easy ways to kill unwanted emails, and they never involve sending angry rants to the sender. (Don't do that. It won't help.)
Look for Unsubscribe Links
The cleanest way to get off a list is to use the built-in unsubscribe option. That link is generally buried at the bottom of the message, in tiny type or made to not even look like a link, all the better to keep you subscribed. This purposeful obfuscation is called dark patterns, or more clearly, deceptive design.
Thankfully, many web-based or app-based email options try to make unsubscribes easy.
By the way, the chance that the unsubscribe link is a trick—a way to confirm to a spammer that you are a real person—is low. But be smart about it; if something looks fishy in any message, just mark the whole thing as spam and delete it.
Google Gmail
Gmail makes it outrageously easy to unsubscribe from unwanted mailing lists. Whenever it notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email. Sometimes it appears in place of the Spam icon in the toolbar. Click it and a giant Unsubscribe dialog appears.
On mobile, tap the three-dot menu up top. If the sender offers an easy unsubscribe option, the word Unsubscribe will appear on the menu.
Microsoft Outlook
Prominent unsubscribe links are also found on Outlook.com and the Outlook apps as well. On the web, it says "Getting too much email? Unsubscribe" at the top of a supported message.
Apple's iOS Mail App
On the built-in iOS Mail app, look for a banner reading "This message is from a mailing list. Unsubscribe" atop your messages, which will email the sender with the unsub request.
Edison Mail
Edison Mail for iOS, macOS, and Android shows a large Unsubscribe button at the top of a message (with a Resubscribe button if you change your mind). Edison Mail also offers a Block option on messages, so you never have to see anything from the sender ever again.
Not all email apps recognize unsubscribe links the same way or support them within the same messages, though. Thankfully, when you're on a mobile app that supports multiple services (usually Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, and other IMAP accounts), you can unsubscribe across all the email services.
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Unsubscribe Services
Want to unsubscribe from mail in a big batch? Several services make it possible. The downside is that you have to give these services complete access to your inbox in order for them to find messages with an unsubscribe option, and sometimes that includes access to your contacts or even your calendar. Like Heinlein said: there's no such thing as a free lunch.
SaneBox
Years ago we gave SaneBox a perfect 5-star score in a review that said, among other superlatives, that "SaneBox is the best thing that has happened to email since email's invention." That Editors' Choice pick still stands today.
SaneBox now uses some artificial intelligence to improve the contents of your inbox. The video above shows how you can train your inbox to keep your efficiency up.
But how do you use it to clean up all that unwanted email? The AI takes care of some of that, but whatever sneaks through can be dragged to a folder called SaneBlackhole, which has the gravitational pull to make sure nothing from that sender ever bothers you again.
Unroll.me
Available on the web or via a mobile app, Unroll.me looks into the heart of your Outlook.com/Hotmail/Live, Gmail/Google Workspace, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, and Aol email accounts to locate messages you probably don't want. You can also try an email address from another service.
In return, you get a list of all the senders you could nix; pick the ones you don't want, and Unroll.me does the rest. It also offers a service called The Rollup so you can re-subscribe to select mailings, which get funneled to you via Unroll.me in a daily digest. Edit (or deactivate) The Rollup any time.
Unroll.me is free, but it does require that you provide it full access to your messages and contacts. Its parent company claims that it ignores personal email and anonymizes the messages it sees, but it's using all of the data to sell market research in the background even after you stop actively using it, since you'll probably forget about it once it delivers what you wanted.
Leave Me Alone
Leave Me Alone supports Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, iCloud, Aol, and any IMAP accounts. Connect them all. There's also an account option for big teams. Do a one-off payment of $7, which gives seven days of access to quickly get an entire inbox (for one account) under control. Or pay $9 or $16 a month for full control, depending on what level of control is needed. Leave Me Alone also offers a roll-up email digest of some of the messages you don't want to miss out on, plus an Inbox Shield screener service to look at all the messages before they arrive.
Clean Email
A single account at Clean Email is $29.99 per year or you can do up to five users for $49.99 per year or $99.99 annually for a full team (there are more expensive monthly options starting at $9.99). It claims to "clean" 5 million emails per day. It offers a web interface that aggregates all the web-based email services (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, iCloud, IMAP accounts) in one big inbox that can be cleaned up in a few clicks, whether you're bulk unsubscribing, black-listing senders, or setting up filters and rules. It has a trial so you can try it for free. It claims it doesn't analyze and sell data like Unroll.me.
If the options above all seem either fishy, not powerful enough, or too expensive, there are other possibilities you can check out like Cleanfox, unlistr (for Outlook only), and Mailstrom. All have a free option, or at least a free trial, so it's worth giving them a try.
Most importantly, the best way to avoid getting junk mail in the future is to stop using your good email address to sign up for things. Create an anonymous email alias to use instead.
About Our Expert
I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).
I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.
In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.
I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
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