If You Haven’t Already Deleted Your Unroll.Me Account, Do It Now

Back in 2017, Unroll.me—the third-party service that attempts to unsubscribe you from unwanted email threads and newsletters—came under fire for collecting user information, selling it to Uber, and saving copies of emails and other data without notifying its users.

These findings led to an investigation and subsequent lawsuit by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which finally reached a settlement this week. Part of the settlement requires Unroll.me to delete all that saved user info, and requires the company to be more transparent about how it access, collects, and sells any data it collects going forward.

Even though your previously stored data is about to be removed from Unroll.me’s servers, we think you should take an additional step: Check to see if you’ve ever shared your Gmail account with Unroll.me and, if so, remove access.

Gmail and other email services now provide similar (hands-off) techniques for unsubscribing from emails. More importantly, you should resist the urge to turn over your entire inbox to a third-party service unless you have a great reason for doing so (and faith that they whatever companies you’re giving access to your email won’t share that data with other companies or use it to market more products to you).

Whether you’ve stayed with Unroll.me this whole time, or you have an old account that’s no longer being used, the recent FTC settlement is a good excuse to delete your account and revoke Unroll.me’s access to your Gmail. We’ll show you how to do so using steps originally outlined by tech blogger and UX designer Per Axbom.

Delete your Unroll.me account

  1. To delete your Unroll.me account, sign in on the service’s home page.

  2. Click the “Hamburger” icon net your account name, then click “Settings”

  3. Scroll down and click “Delete my account.”

  4. You’ll get a pop-up asking if you really want to delete your account and provide a reason for leaving, though that’s optional. Click “Delete My Account” to make it final.

Despite having deleted your account, Unroll.me may still technically have access to your Gmail, in which case you’ll have to remove it manually to complete this process.

  1. Open accounts.google.com and log in with your Google Account if you aren’t already.

  2. Click “Security” from the side menu.

  3. Scroll down and click “Manage third-party access” 

  4. Scroll down until you locate Unroll.me from the apps list. Click to highlight it, and then click “Remove Access”.

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