Thanks for Nothing, Unroll.Me

Thoughts on unsubscription, after an appalling discovery.

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The year is, I don’t know, 2011? 2012?

An easy to use website called Unroll.Me advertises inbox organization with the simple input of your e-mail address. With a few clicks of some buttons, et voila!, anyone sending information your way can be quickly dropped into one of three buckets:

Keep — for emails un-gated, free to come marching, willy-nilly, into your inbox at any time of day. Rollup — a daily digest of e-mails “rolled up” into one easy-to-read daily missive that arrives when you tell it to. Unsubscribe — for e-mails you never want to see, ever again.

Except, it isn’t.

Photo by Simonetta Pugnaghi on Unsplash

In a first-week-of-the-year attempt at something resembling productivity while still fairly tethered to my sickbed, I set out to do some inbox management. For over a year now, Google has been reminding me monthly that I’m not playing the game of Free! Up! Space! very well.

Too cheap to pay for more storage I’m convinced I don’t need, with each reminder I’d taken to hysterical bouts of scrounging to make more room before I run out entirely. In the process, Google falsely promises “help managing storage” the same way my seven year old offers to “help cook dinner.”¹ Moving mere megabytes at a time, I come perilously closer and closer to the 15GB limit and another $2 out the door every month. Two dollars I just can’t, on principle, fathom giving to Google.

Last week, while poking around in my alphabetically arranged Gmail desktop folders, I found one labeled Unroll.Me. Call me blind or busy or any other rightful name, but I — honest-to-God — had never noticed this folder before.

It was a revelation over a decade in the making.

Within this folder, I was appalled to find that every e-mail which had been collected into a Rollup still lived. Even more horrifying than this, though, was that EVERY SINGLE EMAIL I HAD EVER THOUGHT I WAS UNSUBSCRIBED FROM did too, in their own subfolder labeled Unsubscribed.

By emptying those two folders, filled with hundreds of thousands of e-mails combined, I cleared out over 10GB worth of space and 10 YEARS PLUS worth of e-mails I probably never needed in the first place. Clearly, I’m still reeling from this discovery.

As of today, my Unsubscribed tab on Unroll.Me’s website says that over the years I’ve elected to unsubscribe from 2,837 individual e-mail addresses. Meanwhile, I’d outsourced that responsibility to a third party who’d never even promised the service I thought they were providing, in the first place.

It was organization they’d been offering, not release.

Letting go is on me.

Every other day or so, I visit these folders and empty them, but not without first going in and manually unsubscribing from the ones I truly don’t want anymore. In realtime, this means that on most days I’m unsubscribing from hundreds of emails, most I had at some point in the last 10+ years signed up for, even unknowingly.

Yes, I, Kristine, brave the tiny text at the bottom of each and every single e-mail hunting for hidden hyperlinks, face the “ARE YOU SURE?” landing pages with broken hearts, sad-faced symbols, and more bubbles to check or uncheck than a scantron, and do the hard work of unsubscription myself.

“We hate to see you go,” says David’s Bridal, not realizing that it’s been seventeen years since I bought my wedding dress and more than a decade since I “opted out” of receiving their e-mails.

I’ve been “gone” for awhile, only for real, this time.

It turns out Unroll.Me and I have very different definitions of “get rid of.” This info would have would have been useful to know YEARS AGO.

I’m not decrying Unroll.Me. They made no promises to me beyond language I’d otherwise assumed meant one thing while merely taking the form of it, shoving e-mails I didn’t want into folders still taking up space in my life, space I might have paid for, for no reason.

It took me a whole year of intentionally cleaning out my Gmail to even uncover the true culprit of the bulk of my extra baggage.

I was supposed to notice.

There are a lot of things in this world promising the semblance of something they can’t truly give us. I don’t need to tell you what those things are, in your life, but I’m sure you can probably think of at least one. It might even be the thing you’re eschewing this very first month-of-the-year, nobly setting it aside to see what life feels like without it.

For me, the thing is social media.

Time and time again, I’ve been reminded that being away frees up mental space in the moment. By logging off for a few days to months at a time, I “get rid” of the mental clutter and become a little more present to my life. It’s weird and lovely, and I’m always refreshed when I return. And I have, inevitably returned every time, thinking that “organizing” my online life a little better is the fix.

Being gone², I’m learning, is something entirely different.

This year, there’s no question whether I will turn to it for “something better” than what’s right in front of me. No question of whether it’ll be just for the month or a few weeks or until some internal meter tells me I’ve gotten enough space to return. No question that if I want to laugh, to be inspired, to be soothed, or to connect, the impetus is on me to make that happen in my own life.

And the trickledown effect of what this recovered space does to my whole life is significant. I’ve been here before, but not quite like this. It’s a paradigm shift unlike most any other, in my life.

There are no proverbial folders of information I don’t need any longer collecting in the recesses of the interweb that I will one day feel the need to get caught up on. I’m presently very aware that there are cultural trends being made and discussed and riffed upon in Reels and Stories right now that I am missing out on.

But I’m not missing it.

When we are at work, watching our kids, having a meal, or sitting through a meeting, our regular interface with the digital ecology has trained us to feel as if something else is always happening, something potentially more important. And so many of us feel the itch to peek and know. The result is that whatever is taking place around us, whatever proximate reality we find ourselves in, it begins to feel less interesting, more stifling, and more like something we want to be released from or bypass altogether.

— Felicia Wu Song, “Restless Devices”

We must take ownership of the work it takes to truly get rid of the things we don’t need when that action alone goes against the norms of society, be they within our physical or “digital ecology.”

Like the spacious freedom I felt in deleting thousands of emails that had simply been sitting there unbeknownst to me, I’m feeling the lightness in recalling “the genuine goods borne out of a social landscape where human presence dominates and [I am asked] to simply be present to what lies before [me].”³

Even, and especially, when it requires commitment to continued work on my end.

I know it’s worth it.

Thanks for nothing and everything, Unroll.Me,

1. Don’t get me wrong, I love his involvement in the kitchen and very rarely say “no,” but at this stage in his culinary development, it often creates more work for me.

2. I know I’ve said “for 2024,” but I’m contemplating deleting altogether.

3. Felicia Wu Song, Restless Devices (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 83.