Gmail’s New Feature Helps You Reclaim Your Inbox In One Fell Swoop
TL/DR:
Gmail now has a built-in subscription manager
See and unsubscribe from all subscriptions in one place
Spend 2 minutes today and cut your inbox in half
And use the “gmail + trick” to save your inbox going forward.
The Whole Shebang:
To say I’m excited is an understatement.
To say I’m an efficiency nerd is just the truth.
But I’ve been waiting for this Gmail feature for A LONG TIME.
And it’s finally here. (Yipee!)
What is it?
The ability to manage your email subscriptions - in one place - natively in Gmail.
Why should you care?
Yes, I know, you can manage subscriptions en masse via unroll.me, but it’s a 3rd party app, it requires extra clicks, and sometimes that enough of a barrier, you know?
So now, Gmail has brought this functionality in house (er, in app?)
You can see what you’re subscribed to, and unsubscribe from all those mailing lists you forgot you signed up for, in one place.
If you’re drowning in automated emails you did actually sign up for, but find unsubscribing to be a chore, now it’s really easy to do.
Heck, if you spend 2 minutes doing this today, I bet your inbox will be 50% less overwhelming tomorrow. At least!
How do you use it?
From the left hand nav, navigate to “More” > Manage subscriptions
You’ll see all the subscriptions you have.
Scroll through them and click “unsubscribe” over on the left for each subscription you’d like to unsubscribe from.
Bonus points: add a task to your task system, or set a reminder somewhere, for you to do this again every few months.
Stop playing “email subscription whack-a-mole” for good!
(Warning: Make sure you don’t accidentally unsubscribe from MY email list when you’re doing this; if you’re still reading, then I’m pretty sure you’re gonna wanna make sure you keep getting my emails :) )
What about those subscriptions you’re not ready to unsubscribe from, just in case, but don’t want cluttering your inbox?
(You know, for the coupons! Or because you might want to read that newsletter someday, even though you rarely do.)
Been there! And here’s the trick that fixed it for me:
Did you know that you can add a + and additional text to the part of your email before the @ sign and that any email you send to that address will still go to your Gmail inbox??
For instance, let’s say your email is jillsmith@gmail.com.
Well, you can use the email jillsmith+spam@gmail.com when signing up with some company just to get the coupon, AND THEN you can create a filter to have emails sent to this email "Skip the inbox" + "mark as read".
Bada bing, bada boom, now you can search for the coupon in your inbox, without EVER having to see these emails unless you want to and actively search for them.
And, let’s say you sign up for some newsletters or Substacks that sound interesting to you.
But you inevitably find that you don’t have time to read them, but you do really wanna read them, so you leave them in your inbox “just in case”.
But really, every time you’re in your inbox, these emails:
make you feel bad because you’re not reading them, even though tyou want to and
create a whole lot of clutter, of noise, that drowns out the signal (the important, but rare, emails that you do, in fact need to read.)
In this case, assuming your’re still jillsmith@gmail.com, all you gotta do is start signing up for all those newsletters with jillsmith+newsletter@gmail.com, and then you can create a filter to have emails sent to this email "Skip the inbox" + "label as: could read".
And again, bada bing, bada boom, now, you’re getting those emails, and they’re right there whenever you want to read them, but they’re not in your face cluttering your inbox and making you feel bad!
So, what do you say?
Is it time for a quick round of “Inbox Detox” using this new Gmail feature?
When you’re ready, here are 3 ways we can work together:
Enroll in the Time Well Spent course
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Get 1:1 Coaching
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