GMail Productivity: Automatically Find All Unsubscribable List, Notification, and Sales Messages

Subscribed to mail­ing lists? How about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, and oth­er announce­ments? Do you even know how many announce­ment, list, and group sales e‑mails you get? A sim­ple GMail or Google Apps Mail fil­ter can not only show you exact­ly how many mes­sages you get that you can eas­i­ly unsub­scribe from, but it can also make unsub­scrib­ing a snap.

Nearly all the mail we’re talk­ing about–legitimate (e.g. not spam) but not always necessary–mail offers a link at the bot­tom to let you unsub­scribe or opt out of receiv­ing future mail. Moreover, the lan­guage used to iden­ti­fy these links is invari­ably “unsub­scribe,” “opt out,” or “be removed from”. That makes them easy to iden­ti­fy, group, and process using a sim­ple mail filter.

Below (Figure 1) you can see my Google Apps Mail inbox clear­ly iden­ti­fy­ing such mail–those marked with the pink “Unsubscribable” label. (Yes, I know “unsub­scrib­able” isn’t a word, but for the label I need­ed some­thing short, if not gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect.) That mail is auto­mat­i­cal­ly labeled thus­ly for me, and, by vis­it­ing the “Unsubscribable” fold­er on the left (Figure 2), I can see all of my list mail grouped togeth­er. From there, it’s a sim­ple mat­ter of open­ing each, click­ing the unsub­scribe link at the bot­tom, and being done with the list, noti­fi­ca­tions, or sales mes­sages for­ev­er. (Obviously some of those I want to receive, so I’ll leave those alone)

Figure 1: [Click thumb­nail to zoom] My inbox with noti­fac­tion and list mail clear­ly labeled. 

Figure 2: [Click thumb­nail to zoom] All “unsub­scrib­able” mail is also col­lect­ed into a sin­gle label-folder for even eas­i­er access and action. 

To cre­ate the same sys­tem with­in your GMail or Google Apps Mail inbox, fol­low these very sim­ple steps:

1. In the top-right of your inbox click the gear icon and select Settings.
2. Select the Filters tab from the Settings screen.
3. At the bot­tom of the Filters screen click the link for Create New Filter. Up will pop the Filter def­i­n­i­tion dia­log (Figure 3). 
   

   Figure 3: The Filter def­i­n­i­tion dialog. 
4. The “Has the Words” field tells Gmail to search entire mes­sages for spe­cif­ic key­words or phras­es. In this case, we want it to find those phras­es com­mon to mail from which you might want to unsubscribe–“unsubscribe,” “opt out,” or “be removed from”. In that field enter the fol­low­ing, inclu­sive of quo­ta­tion marks.

   unsubscribe OR "opt out" OR "be removed from"

   The “OR” tells the fil­ter to trig­ger if it finds any one of the list­ed phras­es (see Figure 4).

   

   Figure 4: Setting the fil­ter con­di­tions to search mes­sages for the right phrases. 
5. Now that we’ve set the con­di­tions by which the fil­ter will trig­ger, click Continue to get to the screen where we’ll define the actions that occur when the fil­ter is triggered.
6. There are many actions you can choose from, but for this fil­ter, we sim­ply want to apply a label. Check the box beside “Apply the Label” and then click in the drop­down box to the right to select the appro­pri­ate label (Figure 5). 
   

   Figure 5: Choosing the label to apply to match­ing mail. 
7. If you don’t already have an “Unsubscribable” or oth­er suit­able label, as I did­n’t, choose “New Label” from the top of the list and cre­ate the “Unsubscribable” label, option­al­ly as a child nest­ed under a par­ent label (see Figure 6). 
   

   Figure 6: Adding the new “Unsubscribable” label in the New Label dialog. 
8. With the label select­ed Gmail will tell you how many con­ver­sa­tions (i.e. mail threads) already received match the con­di­tions of the fil­ter (Figure 7). Check the “Also apply fil­ter to…” option to process those con­ver­sa­tions, and then click the Update Filter but­ton to acti­vate and apply the filter. 
   

   Figure 7: Not only does the Filter Action screen enable you to define actions to take on match­ing mail, it shows how many con­ver­sa­tions or threads already match the con­di­tions of the filter. 
9. Return to your inbox and you’ll see mail labeled “Unsubscribable”. You’ll also see in the left col­umn a label-folder with the same name. To most eas­i­ly dis­tin­guish list and noti­fi­ca­tion mail from any oth­er type, click the lit­tle box to the right of the “Unsubscribable” label-folder and choose a color.

From now on, all the mail con­tain­ing “unsub­scribe,” “opt out,” or “be removed from” will be marked as “Unsubscribable”, in the col­or you chose. You can also vis­it the “Unsubscribable” label-folder to see all such mail. Unsubscribe from those you want by view­ing the mes­sage, click­ing the “unsub­scribe” (or what­ev­er) link at the bot­tom, and fol­low­ing the indi­vid­ual unsub­scribe or opt-out instructions.

You can, of course, leave the fil­ter active indef­i­nite­ly. However, I used mine only tem­porar­i­ly. Because it also tags noti­fi­ca­tion and list mail I want to receive, and because the mauve “Unsubscribable” tag can get dis­tract­ing in my inbox, I dis­abled the fil­ter after unsub­scrib­ing from every­thing I did­n’t want.