A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber
Tags: email, startup, webdev
Published: 2018-12-29 19:49:21

---
title: A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber
description: Unsubscribe from email lists without compromising your privacy with Leave Me Alone 🙅‍
published: true
tags: email,startup,webdev
cover_image: https://blog.squarecat.io/content/images/2018/12/pau-casals-721659-unsplash-1.jpg
canonical_url: https://blog.squarecat.io/a-privacy-focused-alternative-to-unroll-me-and-unsubscriber/
---

Did you know that in 2018, spam messages still account for **48.16%** of all e-mail traffic worldwide? [[source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/420391/spam-email-traffic-share/)]

It’s easy to sign up to mailing lists, it’s much more difficult to find them in your inbox, and **almost impossible to unsubscribe from them all** easily.

We’ve all been there. Swamped with emails every day until you make a deal with yourself to find and click “unsubscribe” on all of the spam and subscription lists you receive. But, it’s time consuming and you need to focus on the important emails. So you toss them aside and the following week you have the same problem again.

> In 2018, spam messages account for 48.16% of all e-mail traffic worldwide

Of course then there’s all the emails you receive from the services you’ve signed up to, who think it’s a good idea to have **25 different types of email notification** for every possible interaction with your account or profile.

![A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber](https://blog.squarecat.io/content/images/2018/12/email-notifications---twitter.png)<figcaption>Twitter email notification settings in 2018</figcaption>

Not all mailing lists are bad by any means — I have several that I enjoy receiving and reading. I needed a service which showed me what I was subscribed to and allowed me to easily **choose what to opt out of**.

### Unethical practices

Finding a service to unsubscribe from unwanted email lists was the easy part, I quickly found [Unroll.me](https://unroll.me) and [Unsubscriber](https://getunsubscriber.com) offering to help me for free (though Unsubscriber don’t support Gmail). Finding a service which didn’t **sell all of my data for marketing purposes** was where I struggled.

Both Unroll.me and Unsubscriber are able to offer their service for free because they make their money by **collecting the metadata AND content of your emails and selling it**. If you use Unroll.me you’re allowing them to share your personal information how they please with any ‘partners’ they choose. Mildly better, sign up to Unsubscriber and they’ll use your data to improve their products, services and advertising — still pretty ambiguous.

Unroll.me even made headlines last year when they sold user data to Uber. You can read about this on the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-firm-slice-unroll-me-backlash-uber.html), [Life Hacker](https://lifehacker.com/unroll-me-the-email-unsubscription-service-has-been-c-1794593445), [Wired](https://www.wired.com/2017/04/stop-services-like-unroll-snooping-gmail/), [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/24/unrollme-mail-unsubscription-service-heartbroken-sells-user-inbox-data-slice), and [CNET](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-remove-unroll-me-from-your-gmail-account).

Still, some changes have been made to protect customers. Since the introduction of GDPR in May 2018, Unroll.me no longer provides support to customers in the EU, as they’re unable to comply with the GDPR regulations. See [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/05/unroll-me-to-close-to-eu-users-saying-it-cant-comply-with-gdpr/), [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/wlf/2018/11/05/regulatory-and-legal-barriers-to-tech-company-market-entry-success-stubbornly-persist/#7498bad48e64), and [BBC News](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44239126) for further details.

![A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber](https://blog.squarecat.io/content/images/2018/12/unroll_me_gdpr-border.png)<figcaption>Unroll.me checks if the user is in the EU (December 2018)</figcaption>

### There’s light at the end of the tunnel

Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of my data being exploited, I decided to build an **ethical privacy-first email opt-out service** called [Leave Me Alone](https://leavemealone.xyz) with my partner [James](https://twitter.com/JamesIvings).

Leave Me Alone lets you see all of your subscription emails in one place and automatically unsubscribe from them with a single click.

![A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber](https://blog.squarecat.io/content/images/2018/12/toggle-unsubscribe-1.gif)<figcaption>It’s as easy as 1 click to unsubscribe from spam emails with Leave Me Alone</figcaption>

We’ll NEVER compromise your privacy. When we scan your inbox for subscriptions, we **never** store the content of any of your emails on our servers **in any form** , and any sensitive data is **always encrypted** at rest.

The only data we do store is recipient and sender address, and a timestamp to identify if you have unsubscribed from a list in the past. You can see our entire privacy policy [here](https://leavemealone.xyz/privacy).

We promise to never exploit you or your data. We only want to help you regain control of your inbox and banish unwanted spam emails.

### How we make money

So that we can keep your data safe Leave Me Alone is a paid service.

The prices are tiered depending on how far back in time you want to scan your inbox for spam email lists.

We’ll scan your inbox for any subscription emails received in the **last 3 days for free**. To scan for email subscriptions received in the **last week, last month, or last 6 months** , you can make a one-time purchase of one of these packages paid per scan.

![A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber](https://blog.squarecat.io/content/images/2018/12/pricing-small.png)<figcaption>Leave Me Alone pricing</figcaption>

### Clean your inbox

You can start using Leave Me Alone right now. Login with your Gmail at [https://leavemealone.xyz](https://leavemealone.xyz).

We hope you find our email opt out service useful and that it can help you. If you have any questions or feedback don’t hesitate to contact us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/dinkydani21) or via email at [leavemealone@squarecat.io](mailto:leavemealone@squarecat.io).

Enjoy your clean inbox!

![A Privacy Focused Alternative to Unroll.me and Unsubscriber](https://blog.squarecat.io/content/images/2018/12/2-landing-page-first-draft-1.png)