Email unsubscribe services promise to help you regain control of your inbox by identifying and unsubscribing from unwanted emails on your behalf. After testing six popular services over two months, we found that unsubscribing from unwanted emails—even when you’re paying someone else to do it—is a losing battle. Here’s why.
On the surface, the email unsubscribe services we tested appeared to be doing their job. At the end of the test period, we had received only a dozen or so spam emails in each account’s primary inbox, rather than 100 of them.
However, after examining our test email accounts, we found that many of the services didn’t actually unsubscribe us from anything. Edison Mail and Unroll.me, for example, set rules or filters that moved unwanted emails into newly created subfolders called “Unsubscribed” or simply dumped them in the trash bin. When we requested that emails be rolled up into a daily digest or that a delivery be paused, Clean Email and Leave Me Alone created subfolders labeled “Read Later,” “Rollups,” or “To-Do List.” So even though these junk emails were hidden from sight, they were still taking up valuable storage space. (And you may have to pay for such hidden stashes: If you don’t clean out these subfolders or a larger trash bin, your email provider may ask you to pay a fee if you hit its storage limit.)
In our interviews, the makers of these unsubscribe tools mentioned that many email providers automatically empty the trash bin after several weeks on the user’s behalf. But this is an inadequate explanation for the disappointing performance of services that require access to your private data or charge a fee in exchange for a supposed fix to the email-inundation problem. (More on that later.) So we’ll call these unsubscribe failures.
When we checked these hidden folders, we found hundreds of emails from lists that these services had promised to eliminate—ranging from 129 emails with Edison Mail to 345 emails with Clean Email. Hundreds more had also accumulated in the trash.
Overall, these email unsubscribe services do the following, to varying degrees:
- Try to unsubscribe you: They ask the unwanted-email sender to unsubscribe you from its mailing list by sending an email request or utilizing the Unsubscribe button or link in an email you receive.
- Create inbox rules: They set rules or filters in your email client that send unwanted emails to a newly created subfolder or to the trash bin.
- Make a block list: They add unwanted emails to their private list of bad-faith emailers that don’t honor unsubscribe requests, and they promise to block those senders’ messages from arriving in your inbox.
When we asked about these convoluted workarounds, the unsubscribe services offered varying explanations. Edison Mail CEO Mikael Berner called traditional email Unsubscribe links “unreliable,” adding that people who used those functions “continued to receive messages well after unsubscribing.” Clean Email, Cleanfox, and Mailstrom spokespeople echoed that sentiment in our interviews; each of the services creates its own block lists or trash filters. And James Ivings, founder of Leave Me Alone, said the service doesn’t permanently delete messages on behalf of clients but instead moves all unsubscribe failures to a subfolder, rather than to the trash bin. Or, depending on the particular feature you use, it may instead block any lists you previously tried to unsubscribe from.
Linking any service to your email account is a difficult decision. To function, most of these tools and services need access to your account, and that means they get a comprehensive view into your email. That can get squirrely for privacy, as evidenced by the 2019 FTC settlement with the service Unroll.me, which the FTC alleged in a complaint “failed to disclose adequately” that it collected and sold information from its users’ inboxes.
That controversy has led to more transparency among these types of services but still hasn’t eradicated every concern. It has also divided the unsubscribe services into two camps: the free ones, which disclose the fact that they use the data they collect for market studies and then share it with advertisers, product developers, and consumer-behavior marketers; and the paid services, some of which promise that they don’t share anything with third parties. The good news is, everyone now knows that the free services analyze this data and package it up for various marketing purposes. The bad news is, well, they analyze this data and package it up for various marketing purposes.
The developers behind every unsubscribe tool we tested told us that although they can technically see the contents of customer emails, the emails undergo security assessments and have access restricted or information redacted when possible, and they encrypt the data that they do collect. These companies often claim to use algorithms to filter out personal emails and gather only commercial emails, but as Thorin Klosowski, Wirecutter’s editor of privacy and security coverage, noted, that’s nearly impossible to validate, and even in the best cases it can fail. Though the companies all emphasize that safeguards are in place, it’s possible that any third-party service you give permission to view your email accounts might access emails it isn’t supposed to, including email conversations with doctors, pharmacists, teachers, or accountants.
We combed through the policies of each company but also sent each a questionnaire with specific questions about their level of access, where the data goes, and what gets shared. Here’s what they told us.
Can the service read your emails?
- Clean Email: Yes.
- Cleanfox: Yes.
- Edison Mail: Yes.
- Leave Me Alone: Yes.
- Mailstrom: Yes.
- Unroll.me: Yes.
Are those emails ever stored on company servers?
- Clean Email: Full messages aren’t stored on the servers.
- Cleanfox: Emails aren’t stored on the servers.
- Edison Mail: Works to limit how much information is stored on company servers and transfers most of the messages between the user device and mail provider.
- Leave Me Alone: Content the user authorizes, such as digest emails. If you do not use the service’s roll-up feature and only unsubscribe, it doesn’t store anything.
- Mailstrom: Only email subject lines.
- Unroll.me: No; only accessed through IMAP so they remain secure in the email client.
Is data shared with a third party?
- Clean Email: No.
- Cleanfox: Yes.
- Edison Mail: Yes.
- Leave Me Alone: No.
- Mailstrom: No.
- Unroll.me: Yes.
What data is shared with third parties and why?
- Clean Email: n/a.
- Cleanfox: Collected data, such as age, gender, purchase history, price, delivery method, discounts, and city of delivery, is anonymized and aggregated for market studies.
- Edison Mail: Insights about shopping trends from aggregated and anonymized transaction data provided by app users.
- Leave Me Alone: n/a.
- Mailstrom: n/a.
- Unroll.me: Collect data for market studies provided by Nielsen Consumer, LLC.
Do you have dedicated data usage explanations (besides a privacy policy)?
Some email decluttering tools are free, while others charge from $9 to $15 a month or from $30 to $200 for a yearly subscription. But even when you pay, there’s no guarantee that emails won’t slip through the cracks. For example, the Clean Email strategy left me with 345 individual emails in my inbox and filtered subfolders of emails it couldn’t unsubscribe from, Edison Mail produced 129 emails, Leave Me Alone let 284 emails through, and Mailstrom left behind 142 junk emails. Ultimately, even if these services are hiding emails from your inbox, they’re not actually unsubscribing you from the mailing lists. You’re effectively paying someone to sweep them under the rug.
Price for one inbox, excluding sales and bulk discounts:
- Clean Email: $10 per month; $120 per year.
- Cleanfox: Free.
- Edison Mail: Free.
- Leave Me Alone: $9 per month or $90 per year for general plan; $16 per month or $160 per year for advanced plan.
- Mailstrom: $9 per month or $60 per year for basic plan; $14 per month or $100 per year for plus plan; $30 per month or $200 per year for pro plan.
- Unroll.me: Free.
