Unroll.Me – Easily Declutter Your Subscriptions
As time goes on, our email inbox tends to get cluttered with various kinds of subscriptions, from the supermarket specials this week to new book recommendations from Audible. As the number of subscriptions pile up, it can be harder and harder to pay attention to all of the emails, not to mention the distraction caused by the constant notifications chiming from your phone. Unroll.Me easily solves this problem using a fun and intuitive card-swiping interface.
What does Unroll.Me do?
Unroll.Me lets you choose what email subscriptions you would like to unsubscribe from, keep subscribed, as well as “rollup”.
Rolled up subscriptions will be bundled together, and send to you as a single email once a day, called a Rollup. You can set it to receive your Rollup in the morning, afternoon or evening, whichever fits your workflow better. The content of the Rollup can be accessed through the Unroll.Me app or the webpage, and the original emails will be redirected to a new Unroll.me mailbox, so you can still access them if you wish.
The Unroll.Me app uses a card-swiping interface, similar to that of Tinder. Each card represents a subscription you have, swiping left will unsubscribe you from it, swiping right will keep it, and swiping up will add it to your Rollup.
There is also a list view, although it is less intuitive to use than the card-swiping interface, it gives a broader view of all your subscriptions. The browser version also uses the list view, and it is easier to navigate than the app, as the buttons are listed on the side, so there is no swiping required.
What does it cost?
Nothing! Unroll.Me is completely free to use.
However, Unroll.Me is owned by Rakuten Intelligence, a data collection company that sells insights of social trends. By using their service, they will be able to scan through all of your emails to analysis certain information of interest, but you will be given the option to opt out of this. You can find out more about how they use your data here.
Some of the information they collect include:
- Email subscriptions
- Purchase receipts
- Travel reservations & booking-related emails
- Shipping confirmations & online shipping returns
They also claim that:
We are not interested in your personal emails. Our algorithms and processes are designed to focus on commercial and transactional emails.
However, by downloading a copy of my data on Unroll.Me, I was able to find that they kept all the emails they sampled through. Which means that, while they may not be using your personal emails in their analytics, they still have a copy of everything in your inbox, which can be potentially exposed to security risks in the future.
What are the drawbacks?
The Rollup emails that you receive contains a small and low quality thumbnail of the subscriptions. Additionally, the subscriptions are opened inside the Unroll.Me app (or webpage if the app is not installed, or you are accessing it from a desktop), which has a poorly designed interface, with excessive amount of white space on both sides, leading to extra small fonts that are difficult to read. It is much more comfortable to read the actual email than it is to read through the app.
That been said, reading through the Rollups in a web browser feels fine, as there’s no white space on either sides, but the size is still slightly less than the email counterpart.
Who should use Unroll.Me?
Unroll.Me is best used on your personal email account, where the subscriptions are plenty, and sensitive information are kept to a minimum.
The decision to use Unroll.Me depends on how many subscription emails you receive on average every day. If say, you receive one or two of these emails daily, then you may be better off reading them in their default format. However, if you are receiving more than 5 subscription emails every day, then it may be a good idea to start using Unroll.Me, as it will reduce the amount of interruptions in your workflow.
Before using Unroll.Me, you have to also consider if there is any sensitive information in your email, as they will have a copy of it on their server if you decide to use their service. This could potentially pose a security risk in the future, although unlikely.
Thinking about giving Unroll.Me a shot? Find it here:
