Originally appeared on: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/how-to-manage-your-bulk-email/
March 10, 2014
How to control your bulk email so you can easily see it, without it cluttering your inbox? Get-It-Done Guy has found the perfect solution.
Email! I just love email! Really, I do…No, I don’t. I hate email. I’ve been using it a long time. Longer than you. And the awesomeness wore off before you had even heard of the internet.
Spam was the big problem of the 90s. But for the most part spam is dealt with by spam filters at your mail host.
As I’ve discussed before, I have a separate email address for my potentially-spammable email addresses. When I buy an airline ticket, or shop at an online store, they get the separate email address. That way all the spam they’re going to send ends up in my low priority inbox, which I check…well, never.
“Never” is a problem, though. These days the issue isn’t spam, it’s legitimate mailings for things I’m genuinely interested in ending up in my bulk email folders. These are mailings about how to eat and exercise to develop a manly-man body (eat your heart out, Get-Fit-Guy Ben Greenfield! Soon I’ll be able to do 5 pull-ups! Umm hmm!). They’re emails from theater groups I belong to, marketing information from vendors I actually care about, shipping information for those awesomely fashionable spandex travel underwear (just like Ben’s), and of course my daily dose of comics.
Cloud-based email is my primary inbox. Having my email analyzed, my documents profiled, my privacy invaded, and my reputation hijacked and sold to the highest bidder seems like a small price to pay for several gigabytes of storage. One of the few consolations for this historically unprecedented invasion of privacy is that cloud-based email lets third-party apps access your inbox. A third-party app recently changed my whole email life.
It works with Outlook, Hotmail, MSN, Windows Live, Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and iCloud.
A Digest of All Your Email
Sometimes when you subscribe to an email list, you get the option to receive individual messages as they get sent to the list, or you can get a digest. A digest collects all the individual messages that go to that list in a given day or week and sends them all at once in a single big message. You can then read the digest and see everything at once.
This app takes the idea one step further. It can access all your messages, and it has rules built in so it can figure out what is and isn’t a mailing list. The app is called Unroll.me.
The first time you run it, unroll.me scans your inbox and lists of everything that seems to be from a mailing list. You then decide which you want added to your daily digest, which it calls a “rollup.”
One Daily Review of New Senders
Once you’ve confirmed your mailing list choices, unroll.me works quietly behind the scenes. Every day it pulls all arriving mailing list messages into your rollup. It quietly moves them into a folder called unroll.me, so you don’t see them in your inbox at all. But you don’t have to remember to check the unroll.me folder. Instead, you get a really nicely formatted message once a day that contains your entire rollup and a preview of each message. They’ve done a great job making it visually scannable, so in mere moments, you can review all the incoming activity.
Each daily rollup also contains a link to a special web page where that day’s newly detected mailing lists messages are listed. For each message, you tell unroll.me to add it to your rollup, to keep it in your inbox because you really want to see it, or to unsubscribe you from the mailing list entirely. It takes only a few seconds to choose how to dispose of your incoming messages.
Edit From Your Inbox
If you don’t want to leave your inbox, but still want to add a message to your rollup or unsubscribe from a mailing list, you simply forward the message to rollup@unroll.me or unsubscribe@unroll.me and it’s as if you edited that subscription directly.
Tame Your Friends
Of course, not every unwanted email is from a spammer. Some are from those people in our lives who we’d rather not hear from again, but don’t have the strength of will to confront directly: our ex-boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, or polyamorous family units. The boss three jobs ago who had a crush on us. That helpful neighbor who’s always giving us tips on how we can live our lives even better than we ever imagined.
For these, unroll.me lets you block a contact by email address. They don’t know you’ve blocked them. Their messages get quietly funneled into your “Blocked” folder, kind of like industrial waste. You never have to look at your Blocked folder. Except to gloat.
Unroll.me is free, which is terrifying, since that means somehow, we are the product. But compared to using cloud-based email in the first place, I’m sure the convenience is even more worth it than ever.
You’ve taken control of your spam. You’ve taken control of your must-read inbox. Now unroll.me gives you a perfect way to take control of what’s nice-to-read-but-don’t-clutter-my-inbox. I’ve been using it for two months and can’t imagine how I ever survived without it.
For more easy tips on managing your email, check out quickanddirtytips productivity email
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast, an iTunes top-10 business podcast, from 2007 to 2020. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
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