Show Your Email Who’s Boss with Unroll.me

Email, the greatest productivity enhancer since the beginning of time! Yeah, right…

I look at email all day long. (Well, I intentionally turn it off sometimes to keep it from becoming a distraction, but that’s a post for another time.) At the end of a solid day of work, the last thing I want to do is look at any more emails. Yuck!

Email at Home

So what do I do when I get home? Anything but check my email. When I ignore my home email, I always have this little twinge of fear that I may have missed something important. I don’t think my fear is full-blown FOMO, but I do worry about missing that all-important note from school that says an after-school activity has been cancelled, which means there’s a chance my son is standing all alone on a sidewalk somewhere wondering why no one is picking him up.

Back to email. One of the reasons I get so weary of checking my email at home is because our family email account has become a collection bin for every digital thing we’ve ever been exposed to: Digital receipts from the department store, reminders from the dentist, a notice that someone new is following me on Twitter, and who knows what else? The important stuff is somewhere in there, hiding in that sea of emails.

(That Twitter recollection was a good reminder for this shameless plug: You should Follow @ForPrinters on Twitter!)

Enter Unroll.me

I found a solution. It’s called Unroll.me, and it’s a pretty neat deal! It’s a free service that does two things to really clean up your email so the important stuff doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

First, it provides an easy mechanism to unsubscribe from emails you don’t want to receive any more. Unsubscribing from an email newsletter is usually a pretty easy click on the “unsubscribe” link, but if you use the Unroll.me app for iOS, it’s almost like playing a video game. One flick of your finger, and the app does the unsubscribing for you. Unsubscribing from emails almost becomes fun!

Second, it consolidates any other emails you identify into what’s called the “rollup.” That’s an email from Unroll.me which summarizes the recurring emails you’ve specified. You can still get to the emails that have been “rolled up” … but they’re kept out of the way, which means your “real” emails start to rise to the surface.

The service does a pretty nice job reminding you how well it’s doing to help your email stay clean. Take a look at the progress I made after only a few weeks of using Unroll.me:

Unsubscribing from 20 emails and rolling up 99 more emails really helps the 22 important emails to stand out and get the attention they deserve!

The downside? Unroll.me doesn’t work with every email account. Supported email accounts include Outlook.com (including Hotmail, MSN, & Windows Live), Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and iCloud. For your work email you should be using an address branded to your domain name.  If you are, Unroll.me probably won’t be a big help there. But if you’re like me and you have a non-work email account that’s supported, you’ll find Unroll.me to be a BIG relief! Give it a try!