A new iPhone app will help you get rid of unwanted email just as quickly as you’d condemn a would-be Tinder date to swipe-left oblivion.
The app, called Unroll.Me, plays to our eternal anxiety about email: Namely, having too much of it. Once configured, Unroll.Me identifies email newsletters that clog up your inbox (I’m looking at you, Best Buy), then gives you three options: keep as-is, unsubscribe, or collate into a daily digest called the Rollup. These actions are triggered by some of the same gestures popularized by Tinder: swiping to the right keeps the email, while swiping to the left tells the sender you’d like to unsubscribe.
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“Instead of making Unroll.Me feel like something you have to come to, we wanted to make it something that’s so beautiful and easy to use it would make unsubscribing from emails fun,” Unroll.Me co-founder and COO Jojo Hedaya told Motherboard in a recent interview at the company’s offices in New York City.
“Beautiful” may be a tad flowery, but there’s no denying the app’s usefulness. In just a few minutes Unroll.Me was able scan my personal Gmail account, where it found more than 100 different email newsletters. I ended up keeping the vast majority of them—I’m pretty selective about handing out my personal email address—but did manage to dump about half a dozen or so. Swiping left and right, making decisions about email life and death, isn’t fun in the sense that playing Hearthstone on the B32 bus in Brooklyn is fun, but it’s certainly more delightful than trawling through Gmail one email at a time.
But therein lies the rub: Google in May 2013 flipped the switch on a Gmail feature that automatically siloed emails from marketers and social media networks into their own separate tabs, leaving your primary inbox free from such distractions. The company went one step further in October 2014, releasing a dedicated app called Inbox that only displays emails algorithmically deemed to be important. Using these Google-provided tools lessens the need to rely upon third-party services like Unroll.Me to handle the load for you.
Now, not everyone uses Gmail, but 900 million people do; it became the most popular email service in the US, beating Hotmail (since renamed Outlook.com), in 2012. And while Unroll.Me does support other popular email services, including AOL, iCloud, and Yahoo, AOL and iCloud users will have trust the company with their password in order for the service to gain access to their account. Gmail, Outlook.com, and Yahoo use a technology called OAuth, which handles authentication without Unroll.Me accessing your login credentials.
In our interview, Hedaya did claim that Unroll.me is “super secure” (there haven’t been any security incidents with the company’s older web app, it should be noted), but you can understand why that makes us uncomfortable. (This same authentication issue came up with the Sunrise calendar app nearly two years ago.) Few accounts are as personal as your email address, and transmitting those login credentials to a third-party is not typically something we’re OK with. Just stick to OAuth-compatible accounts and you’re golden.
Ultimately, Unroll.Me is what you make of it. If you’ve let your email inbox get out of control there’s no quicker or easier way to perform the necessary triage of mass unsubscribing. But if you’ve given your life to Google and already let Gmail tabs or the Inbox app handle your business, the app is that bit less compelling.
