How to Clean Up Your Email Inbox

As a blogger, you need time to write. And we all know email is one of the biggest productivity killers known to man. Your email dings and you go check it. You don’t look at emails right away and next thing you know you have loads of unread emails sitting in your inbox. Your email taunts you with distractions that keep you from writing, even if it has nothing to do with blogging (like that 50% off email you just received from your favorite store). I recently found a tool to organize your email and I can’t even tell you how much lighter my inbox is because of it.

Readers, meet Unroll.me. They describes themselves like this:

Unroll.me is the free and easy way to end unwanted subscriptions and rollup the rest into an organized overview made just for you.

How Unroll.me Works

When you sign up, the app scans your email and decides which email subscriptions it thinks you’d want added to your rollup. The app currently works with Gmail, Google Apps, and Yahoo. They take security quite seriously and you can read about how it accesses your info on their security FAQ page.

Each day, you get an email from Unroll.me where they “rollup” emails from your subscriptions into ONE SINGLE EMAIL OF BRILLIANCE. Each daily email is organized into categories like Social, Financial, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Travel, Shopping, and more. When you sign up, you get to choose when your rollup is sent: morning, noon, or night. I have mine set to morning and it comes in around 8:30 – 9 am.

If you have a bunch of blogs you subscribe to via email, then this would be a great way to keep up with your favorite blogs without getting individual emails!

A typical daily email looks like this.

Reading an Email from Your Rollup

If you want to read a particular email, you just click the image or text to be directed to a page where you can read the email (and get a nice gallery below if you want to sift through a few emails while you’re there). The downside is that you have to actually click to read the email versus being able to read it within the rollup email.

If you prefer to look at your email the old school way, you can find all these emails within a folder called Unroll.me (If on Gmail, for example, just look in the left menu while on your Gmail homepage) where you can see all the emails if you’d like. OR you can also log into Unroll.me and see a nice gallery of all your emails.

When Unroll.me notices an email subscription not previously in your daily rollup, the app tells you it wants to add the subscription to your rollup. It gives you plenty of notice before it actually adds them and you can add all the subscriptions or pick and choose which ones to add.

If you’re wondering how it detects which emails count, it looks for emails in your inbox that have CAN-SPAM language at the bottom. (CAN-SPAM is a U.S. law that requires commercial email marketers to put certain elements in each email, like an unsubscribe link and physical mailing address.)

To adjust the subscriptions included in your rollup, log into the Rollup.me website and you’ll be taken to the Your Rollup page:

Under each email, you have three options:

• Unsubscribe: If you decide you no longer want to receive an email, then you can click unsubscribe to remove it from your rollup. IMPORTANT: While it says “unsubscribe,” if the email marketer has a simple unsubscribe feature, meaning you click Unsubscribe and it takes you to a page that says you’ve been unsubscribed, then Unroll.me actually unsubscribes you from that list. If the unsubscribe process requires you to log into an app or check/uncheck settings – such if you’re subscribed to many email lists from one company- then it merely removes that email from being “rolled up” and doesn’t technically unsubscribe. Because of this, I suggest manually unsubscribing the old fashioned way.
• Stop rolling up: Perhaps you want one of these emails to come like they always do: directly to your inbox. You can click Stop rolling up to remove it from the app, meaning all emails from that company or organization will come as a separate email again.
• Category: If the app put your email subscription into a wrong category (it happens!), then you can correct it by clickin the toolbox icon. (Notice in my daily email that I need to change my daily Spanish word to another category!)

From a marketing perspective, I was happy to learn that having emails within a rollup won’t negatively affect open rates (i.e. the percentage of people on an email list that open an email). When an email is included in a rollup, that counts as an open and if you click to view the email, that counts as another. That’s good news for bloggers too who receive those types of stats through email services like Mailchimp or AWeber.

Pros and Cons of Unroll.me

True story: I almost didn’t publish this post because I didn’t know if I could truly recommend this app after reading an article about the cons. However, my Facebook fans (looking at you, Laura) nudged me to present both the pros and cons and let readers decide. And since I don’t believe everything I read on the web anyway, I decided to ask Unroll.me myself to find some answers. I’m glad I did because the provided some valuable information that’s sprinkled throughout this post. I can say that I truly do recommend using Unroll.me!

Pros: 

• Easy to use
• Clean interface
• Really reduces the emails in your inbox
• Provides a nice smack in the face as to how much email you truly do subscribe to (which is a good nudge to unsubscribe to some of them)
• Doesn’t negatively affect open rates for email marketers

Cons:

• Unsubscribing through Unroll.me only works for simple, one-click unsubscribe processes (I recommend unsubscribing manually to be sure.)
• Can’t view full email within rollup email (limitation with technology I think but still results in having to click to the web page to read). If you tend to find you’re always reading an email, I suggest moving it out of your rollup and into your inbox.
• Only works for certain email platforms right now (Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo)

Have you tried Unroll.me?

(Note: Some of the screenshots may look different than what you see when you sign up. They made changes yesterday but not everything has the same look yet. I’ll update the screenshots soon!)