The inbox you want holds only the mail that needs you. Unsubscribing gets rid of some of what is in the way. It cannot touch the rest: receipts, statements, delivery notices, security alerts and every new sender that turns up next week. Sortmail files all of that as it lands, so your inbox stays at the few messages from people who are waiting on you.
Two kinds of mail in the way
- Mail you never want. Marketing from a shop you bought from once, newsletters you stopped reading, notifications from apps you no longer use. Unsubscribing stops it.
- Mail you want, but not in front of you. Receipts, bank statements, shipping updates, account alerts, the two newsletters you read at the weekend. Unsubscribing from these would be a mistake. They need to be kept, just somewhere else.
Unsubscribe services only handle the first kind. In most inboxes the second kind is the steady, daily flow, and it is what Sortmail is built for.
How Sortmail handles the mail you keep
Sortmail sorts every incoming message into one of five categories: Actionable, Personal, Receipts, Newsletters and System. You can rename them or add your own, up to 8. Actionable and Personal stay in the inbox. Everything else is labelled and filed, including mail from senders it has never seen before. The newsletters you kept are waiting under Newsletters when you want them.
- It keeps everything. Nothing is unsubscribed and nothing is deleted, and every move is reversible.
- It keeps up with new senders. Every purchase and sign-up adds one, and Sortmail files it on arrival.
- Your rules and corrections decide first. A language model reads a short, masked extract only when no rule matches and the headers do not mark it as a newsletter or system mail, and you can switch that off per mailbox.
- Every message shows why it was filed, and moving one writes a rule for that sender.
- Message bodies are never stored, and your mail is never sold or used to train anything.
- A daily digest shows what stayed in your inbox and, category by category, what was filed and why.
Unsubscribing by hand, in brief
Unsubscribing from mail you never want is worth doing alongside Sortmail, and Gmail has it built in. Search for recent bulk mail:
unsubscribe newer_than:30d- For most bulk senders Gmail shows an Unsubscribe link beside the sender’s name at the top of the message. Click it and confirm.
- Where there is no link, use the sender’s own link in the footer.
- For a sender that ignores you, choose Block from the three-dot menu, and future mail from that address goes to Spam.
- Select all the results and click Archive to clear the backlog.
Where unsubscribing stops helping
- It does not stop receipts, statements, delivery notices or security alerts. You need those, so they keep landing in the inbox beside the mail from people.
- It does not stop new senders. Every purchase, sign-up and new app adds one. Unsubscribing is a clean-up you repeat, not a state you reach.
- It does nothing for the newsletters you want to keep. They still arrive one by one, in the middle of your working day.
- Filters to file what is left match only what you anticipated, and break when a sender changes address or wording.
- All of it is upkeep. You do it again every few months, for as long as you have an inbox.
What to check before connecting any mail tool
Any tool that reads your mailbox, including an unsubscribe service, should answer these plainly. Here is how Sortmail does.
- How is it paid for? Sortmail is paid for by subscriptions. Your mail is never sold, shared or used for anything but sorting it.
- What permissions does it ask for? On Gmail, one mail permission that does not include permanent deletion. Sortmail only labels and archives, and our code calls no send, draft or trash endpoint.
- What does it keep? No message bodies, ever. Delete your account and your data is purged from our live systems within 24 hours.
- Does it act as you? Sortmail never sends, drafts or unsubscribes on your behalf.
The order that works
Unsubscribe from what you never want, then connect Sortmail. The preview shows what is left: the mail unsubscribing could not fix, filed where it belongs. From then on, new senders are handled for you, and the only mail in your inbox is mail that needs you.
See what is left after unsubscribing
Connect a mailbox and Sortmail sorts the last 30 days of your inbox (up to 1,000 messages) free, showing where each message would go and why. It is a preview rather than a trial: nothing is written to your mailbox, no labels and no archiving, until you choose a plan. You judge it on your own mail before you pay anything.
One plan, with every feature in it: $8.99 a month, $79 a year or $139 for 2 years at the founding price, limited to the first 500 subscribers and locked for as long as the subscription runs. A year costs less than 9 months of monthly, and 2 years less than 16. After the founding seats it is $12.99 a month, $99 a year or $169 for 2 years. Cancel in one click in Billing.