Unroll.me is a simple tool that helps people get control of gray mail, email they don't really want, but sometimes need, usually from subscription services. These messages clutter your inbox, distracting you from meaningful email. The free email service Unroll.me consolidates subscription emails and newsletters, Instead of getting 20 emails, you get one summary email. This helps you clean up your inbox and focus on the messages that matter. The controls for including or excluding different messages, or unsubscribing from lists altogether, are dead simple. Unroll.me is a wonderful, free productivity app.
You sign up for Unroll.me by visiting the site, entering your email address, and authenticating access. Unroll.me works for Gmail (including Google Apps Gmail), Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, Windows Live, iCloud email, and AOL Mail. It does not work across multiple accounts at once, which would be ideal, though you can sign up for Unroll.me with each of your email addresses.
Unroll.me analyzes messages in your email account and looks for subscriptions. It then presents to you everything it finds and gives you three options:
add the subscription to your Unroll.me Rollup,
keep it in your inbox, and
unsubscribe.
Here's what each of those options does. All the messages you add to your Rollup will henceforth appear in the digest and in a new folder that's created called Unroll.me folder, but not in your inbox.
If you keep any subscriptions in your inbox, Unroll.me leaves them alone.
If you unsubscribe using Unroll.me, the service figures out the unsubscribe procedure for each sender and completes the action. Unroll.me not only unsubscribes you from the list in question, but it also creates a new rule for the sender so that future messages from that email address go straight into the trash. For true unsubscribe actions, Unroll.me waits 24 hours to make sure you didn't unsubscribe accidentally.
The Rollup
After you decide what to include in your Rollup, you choose to receive it daily, weekly, or monthly, and in the morning, midday, or at night. Those are useful options that help you minimize getting distracted by the digest itself when you're trying to be productive.
The Rollup has two display options as well: grid and list. In both displays, the messages are grouped together into categories. Having similar messages lumped together makes it a little easier to skim them and decide whether there's anything of interest. For example, if you have your next vacation already arranged, you can skip all the deals about flights, hotels, and vacation packages. You can change the category of any email, but you can't create your own custom categories.
The Rollup does contain ads, which is how Unroll.me stays in business, though when I used the services for a few days, I didn't even register the ads. Perhaps that's in part because most of the email subscriptions I have in the summary already look like ads, so what's one more?