Unroll.me is a simple tool that helps people get control of gray mail, email they don't really want, but sometimes need, usually from subscription services. These messages clutter your inbox, distracting you from meaningful email. The free email service Unroll.me consolidates subscription emails and newsletters, Instead of getting 20 emails, you get one summary email. This helps you clean up your inbox and focus on the messages that matter. The controls for including or excluding different messages, or unsubscribing from lists altogether, are dead simple. Unroll.me is a wonderful, free productivity app, though it's not as powerful as some other email assistant services, notably SaneBox, which is an Editors' Choice. Use the two together for the best experience.

How Unroll.me Works
You sign up for Unroll.me by visiting the site, entering your email address, and authenticating access. Unroll.me works for Gmail (including Google Apps Gmail), Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, Windows Live, iCloud email, and AOL Mail. It does not work across multiple accounts at once, which would be ideal, though you can sign up for Unroll.me with each of your email addresses.

With Gmail, the service authenticates access with OAuth, which is secure. But not all email services have such an option. Yahoo!, AOL, and iCloud do not, for example. For those services, you end up giving your login information to Unroll.me. The company acknowledges that it's not an ideal setup.

Unroll.me analyzes messages in your email account and looks for subscriptions. It then presents to you everything it finds and gives you three options:

• add the subscription to your Unroll.me Rollup,
• keep it in your inbox, and
• unsubscribe.

Here's what each of those options does. All the messages you add to your Rollup will henceforth appear in the digest and in a new folder that's created called Unroll.me folder, but not in your inbox.

If you keep any subscriptions in your inbox, Unroll.me leaves them alone.

If you unsubscribe using Unroll.me, the service figures out the unsubscribe procedure for each sender and completes the action. Unroll.me not only unsubscribes you from the list in question, but it also creates a new rule for the sender so that future messages from that email address go straight into the trash. For true unsubscribe actions, Unroll.me waits 24 hours to make sure you didn't unsubscribe accidentally.

The Rollup
After you decide what to include in your Rollup, you choose to receive it daily, weekly, or monthly, and in the morning, midday, or at night. Those are useful options that help you minimize getting distracted by the digest itself when you're trying to be productive.

The Rollup has two display options as well: grid and list. In both displays, the messages are grouped together into categories. Having similar messages lumped together makes it a little easier to skim them and decide whether there's anything of interest. For example, if you have your next vacation already arranged, you can skip all the deals about flights, hotels, and vacation packages. You can change the category of any email, but you can't create your own custom categories.

The Rollup does contain ads, which is how Unroll.me stays in business, though when I used the services for a few days, I didn't even register the ads. Perhaps that's in part because most of the email subscriptions I have in the summary already look like ads, so what's one more?

What Else Is There?
Unroll.me is useful, but pretty specific in the kind of email messages it targets. SaneBox, while not free like Unroll.me is, cleans up your email by sweeiping away all messages that are unlikely to be important to you, reclaiming your inbox as a place where only messages that matter appear. SaneBox doesn't help you unsubscribe you to email lists quickly and en masse the way Unroll.me does, but it is more intelligent, using sophisticated algorithms to determine which messages are truly important.

Another email helper that may be more beneficial to the average person who can't even imagine cleaning up their inbox is InboxVudu, which finds messages that require some kind of action and sucks them into a new app altogether. You can see messages that InboxVudu flagged as important in a browser plugin, in an iOS app, or as notifications on your smartphone or smartwatch. And like Unroll.me, InboxVudu is free.

AwayFind is one more email helper that I find valuable when you're trying to get away from work but really do need to know if a very important person emails you. You set up AwayFind by telling it your VIPs and choosing how you want to be notified if they come a-knocking. For example, you could get a text message every time the CEO of your organization emailed you while you were on vacation. AwayFind helps you ignore you inbox at large while still being able to react quickly to the really urgent messages that arrive.

A Simple Tool for Cleaning Up Gray Mail

One of the pains of email is subscription messages such as coupons, flight deals, alerts that your sister has updated her blog, LinkedIn notifications, and so forth. Unroll.me is a simple and free solution to this specific problem. It's very easy to use, provides good options, and works with a number of Webmail providers. I'd love to see it work across multiple email accounts for more convenience. If you're serious about cleaning up a disastrous inbox, don't overlook Editors' Choice SaneBox, which will do a more thorough job of cleaning up your email, but at the price of $6 per month.