An Easier Way to Unsubscribe from Mailing Lists in Gmail

Gmail has made it easy for you to unsubscribe from email newsletters and other bulk mail. You can open a message, click the “unsubscribe” link and Gmail will automatically remove your email address from the mailing list. This option is however only available on the Gmail website and not if you are using Gmail on the mobile phone or accessing Gmail through an app like Outlook or Dropbox's MailBox.

There are third-party services, Unroll.me for example, that let you remove yourself from unsolicited bulk email but you'll have to grant access to your entire Gmail mailbox and Google contacts to them. The service is no doubt convenient but would I be willing to give full access to my email account to a third-party? Probably not.

Christian Heilmann's tweet – Feature request for Gmail: automatically find and follow the unsubscribe link in all highlighted mails – prompted me to research this topic in a bit more detail and it turned out that building an automated system for unsubscribing from bulk email isn't that difficult. Here's how it looks like:

How to Unsubscribe from Bulk Mail in Gmail

What I have now is a simple Google Script that parses the content of bulk emails and ...read more