How to Unsubscribe From Unwanted Email (2024)

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. Sometimesyou 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 ownunsubscribelink 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.

A Gmail unsub link (Credit: Google)

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

(Credit: PCMag)

Prominent unsubscribe links are also found onOutlook.comand theOutlook appsas 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-iniOS 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 foriOS, macOS,andAndroidshows 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.

(Credit: Edison Mail)

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 acrossallthe email services.

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

Availableon the webor via amobile 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'susing all of the datato 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's Inbox Shield (Credit: 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

(Credit: 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.