Emails likely flood into your inbox every day without any real purpose to you anymore. That newsletter you were interested in just a few months ago may only now serve as an annoyance that needs to be dealt with, and it likely isn't the only email subscription you have this attitude towards.
You may have forgotten you signed up for a specific newsletter or someone snatched your email and put you on a list to receive spam mail. Either way, it can become overwhelming when it seems you have more trash mail in your inbox than ever. If you're a Gmail user, though, you have a secret weapon to tame these email subscriptions.
Previous iterations of Gmail made it easy for you to remove yourself from rogue newsletters that you forgot you signed up for, but you could only unsubscribe yourself from one at a time. Now, Google lets Gmail users batch unsubscribe from multiple newsletters all at once, effectively cleaning up your inbox but also giving you the peace of mind you probably didn't know you could achieve this time of the year. Below, we'll show you where to find and how to use the feature in the mobile apps and the websites.
Where to find the Manage Subscriptions feature in the Gmail app
The new Manage Subscriptions feature is tucked into the sidebar of the Gmail app.
Before you can use the feature, you should check to see if you have it first.
- Open the Gmail app on your iPhone or Android.
- Tap the menu bar at the top left (three stacked lines).
If you have the feature, Manage Subscriptions should be below the Trash section.
Where to find Manage Subscriptions in Gmail for the web
- Log in to Gmail from a web browser.
- On the lefthand panel, click More.
- Click on Manage Subscriptions.
The feature is available for web, Android and iPhones in select countries, so you may need to wait a bit if you don't have the view yet.
How to manage subscriptions from the view
Once you arrive at the Manage Subscriptions section, a list of the newsletters you're currently subscribed to will be displayed, sorted by the most frequent senders and the number of emails they've sent in the past few weeks.
Tapping directly on the sender name will bring up the most recent emails received, and you can easily unsubscribe by tapping the icon to the right of the name, which looks like an email with a minus sign "-" in front of it.
Gmail will send an unsubscribe email to the newsletter you no longer want to receive.
Once you've tapped that unsubscribe icon, Gmail will ask if you want to stop receiving emails from the sender. Once you tap unsubscribe, an email will go to the sender notifying them of the unsubscribe request.
It can take a few days for the sender to honor the request, but going forward, all emails sent by them should be sent to your Spam folder. If you want to get an even better grip on Gmail, don't miss these 10 tips.