Unroll.me: Finally, a solution to my inbox overload

I’ve made it no secret that I despise email. It comes at you fast and furious and constantly interrupts your day. And if you’re not careful, your inbox turns into a giant, never-ending to-do list.

Oh believe me, I’ve made strides over the years. I tried Inbox Zero and that worked for a few weeks. But all that really did was stress me out trying to remember to check my follow-up folder.

Then Google created Priority Inbox which actually helped a lot but still left thousands of unread messages in my “standard” inbox which mentally stressed me out.

And finally, I tried my own system of creating filters to automatically sort my non-personal email into a separate folder just to get it out of my sight but the same problem still persisted—email just kept piling up in folders until the number of emails seemed unmanageable.

Unroll.me solves all of my email problems

Somehow by chance (I think it was fate) I ended up learning about a company called Unroll.me. I was so intrigued that I sought out and interviewed one of the co-founders for my Tech Talk show to learn more about their service. After a 5 minute conversation I was sold and decided to try it out.

All I can say at this point is that I feel like I have my life back. Here’s why. Unroll.me scans your inbox and produces a list of people who send you email. You then make a choice for each one whether to add it to your daily rollup (more on this below) or to keep it in your inbox. For me, I choose to keep only email sent from individuals I know in my inbox and the rest (catalogs, daily coupons, newsletters, etc) in my rollup. There’s also a choice to unsubscribe to any email you no longer wish to receive (you can re-subscribe later if you change your mind).

If you can not see the embedded video above please use the following link: Unroll.me

This whole process took me about 5-10 minutes. And now I only receive the email I truly want in my inbox. The rest is delivered to me once each day in my daily rollup.

Oh, and did I mention the service is free?

What is a rollup?

I should probably explain what the rollup is. In its simplest form, it is one email that contains preview images to all of your other email. Most of the time I can make a decision whether or not I want to read an individual email in my rollup based solely on the preview. But if not (or if I want to read the full email), I just click on the preview image and Unroll.me shows me the full contents of the email along with buttons to unsubscribe or stop rolling up the email.

Mind you, this is all done from the comfort of your own email inbox. You don’t login to Unroll.me. It’s absolutely genius.

Why it works for me

I’ve been using Unroll.me for about two weeks now and it’s clear to me why it works so well. Without Unroll.me if I go a couple of days without processing my email, I end up with dozens of non-essential emails crowding my inbox. Often this leads to me not wanting to deal with them which compounds the problem even more. And before you know it, I have thousands of unread emails in my inbox.

I know what some of you are thinking. I should just unsubscribe to all of the emails I am not attending to. But here’s the thing. I actually want those emails. I just don’t want to have to process them individually every day. With Unroll.me, even if I go a full week without processing my non-essential emails, I only have 7 daily rollup emails in my inbox.

It’s all about the quantity of email in my inbox for me. Like the co-founder from Unroll.me told me on the phone, everyone keeps trying to reinvent the inbox but they don’t think anything is wrong with the inbox.

After using Unroll.me and seeing the impact it had on my daily workflow, I couldn’t agree more.