Email inboxes get filled up pretty quickly with unwanted messages. And mixed in with spam, phishing, and newsletters you can’t seem to unsubscribe from are important messages that you actually need to read and respond to.
It’s estimated that 85% of all the emails we get are spam. That’s a lot of time wasted sorting, deleting, and then permanently deleting unwanted messages.
If you spend just 10 minutes per day identifying and then deleting an unwanted email, that may not seem like a lot, until you add that up over the month and year.
Just 10 minutes per workday equates to over 3 hours per month and about 40 hours per year (a whole workweek).
Beyond the time spent, there is the danger of malware coming from a phishing email. The more email you must sift through, the bigger the risk of one or more of them containing a malicious threat.
How Unroll.Me Cleans Up Your Inbox
Unroll.Me is an application that is supposed to give you a cleaner and less cluttered inbox. It’s not just a spam filter. The app’s website notes that it helps you unsubscribe from unwanted emails, keeps the emails you want, and serves up the rest to you in a daily digest.
Let’s look at each one of those benefits that the app advertises.
Unsubscribe
If you’ve ever gone on a rampage trying to unsubscribe from newsletters or spam mail, you’ll know that it’s not always simple.
Some retailers have legitimate unsubscribe pages and truly take you off their list. Others will take you to a page that looks like you’re in a dangerous corner of the internet.
The page won’t have a proper form and most likely, you’re not unsubscribing from anything for your time. The spammers just put that up to skirt past spam regulators.
Unroll.Me states that the app can help you with the unsubscribe process so you’re not having to do all that work yourself.
Keep
This benefit seems pretty simple. Keep the emails you want. If you’ve ever used an over-aggressive spam filter, then you know some of them can block messages you need. This app looks to have a gentler approach that won’t stop you from getting the emails you want.
Rollup
The rollup feature of Unroll.Me is unique. This allows you to put certain types of emails, like subscription newsletters you want to keep, into a daily digest. This way, you don’t have to get pinged throughout the day when they come in, telling yourself that you’ll read them later.
Instead, the app keeps them for you and “rolls” them together into a daily aggregated format so you can see them all at once when you have time to look through them. You can choose whether you want to see your daily digest in the morning, afternoon, or evening.
Beware of Free Apps That Seem “Too” Helpful
All that email organization and handling of your subscription emails sounds great, right? And on top of that, the app is free.
But you know what they say about free apps. If you’re not paying, then you’re (or rather your data) is the product.
Unroll.Me has a catch when it comes to data privacy, and it’s a pretty big one. We’ll discuss that next.
Here’s the Catch with Using Unroll.Me (Hint: Data Privacy)
When signing up for this free app to handle your email, you’re basically handing over a LOT of personal data to the company. It is fairly transparent about what it does with your data, so that’s good that it’s upfront. But it’s not good news for your security.
When you use the Unroll.Me app, the company is collecting all kinds of information about you from your transactional emails. The company states that it collects information from emails like:
- Email subscriptions
- Purchase receipts
- Travel reservations & booking-related emails
- Shipping confirmations
- Online shipping returns
Note that the company says “like” as in emails like the ones listed. It doesn’t say those are the ONLY ones that it will gather information from.
It does say that it is not interested in personal emails. But you have to read between the lines. Just because the company states it’s “not interested in” doesn’t mean personal email information won’t also be collected.
The company further states that the algorithms and processes “are designed to focus on commercial and transactional emails.” Again, that’s an iffy statement, not an absolute.
Where is Your Data Going?
Your email data is being used by NielsonIQ (the owner of Unroll.Me) for marketing and industry trends and insights information. Your emails are supposedly de-identified and combined with data from other Unroll.Me customers. But data can be re-identified if necessary, by anyone that owns it.
Your data is then sold to businesses of all types, including Fortune 500 companies, investment companies, name-brand retailers, and many others.
Get Help With Business Email Without Sacrificing Your Privacy
Two River Computer can help your Fair Haven business with better email clean-up solutions that will keep spam and phishing at bay without you having to sacrifice your data privacy.
Contact us today for a free consultation. Call 732-747-0020 or reach us online.
