Why the Unsubscriber App Is No Longer Working with Gmail?
Since January 9, 2019, Google has been requiring third-party apps to obey a much stricter set of rules than before if they want to access users’ Gmail inboxes.
“Apps will be asked to demonstrate secure data handling with assessments that include: application penetration testing, external network penetration testing, account deletion verification, reviews of incident response plans, vulnerability disclosure programs, and information security policies,” explains Andy Wen, Senior Product Manager with the Counter Abuse Technology group at Google.
The problem is that the Unsubscriber app collects users’ data and sells it to third parties to make money. Since Google no longer allows this to happen, it has become impossible for Unsubscriber to service Gmail users. That’s right, Unsubscriber for Gmail isn’t working anymore, and users who were relying on the service to keep their Gmail inboxes organized must find a suitable Unsubscriber alternative.
What’s more, Unsubscriber has stopped providing customer support to all users. Inquiries submitted to support are no longer fulfilled by Unsubscriber’s customer support team, and it’s very likely that bugs and other technical issues are not being fixed as well.
Even if you’re not a Gmail user, you should do yourself a favor and look for a suitable Unsubscriber alternative, one that respects your privacy comes with first-class customer support, and is in active development. Clean Email is the email unsubscriber you’re looking for, and we explain exactly what makes it the best unsubscriber alternative in the next chapter of this article.
What Makes Clean Email the Best Unsubscriber Alternative?
There are many alternatives to Unsubscriber, but most suffer from the same problems: lackluster security policies, limited features, unfriendly pricing, and poor usability. Fortunately, there's also Clean Email the only Unsubscriber alternative you need to keep your inbox in pristine condition.
Privacy Policy
Unsubscriber's privacy policy leaves a lot to be desired. The inbox cleaner collects data from and about the commercial electronic messages that are sent to your email accounts and uses it to develop anonymized and pseudonymised data products, improve its products, services, and advertising, and help its customers make better and more informed decisions about their e-commerce efforts.
Translated into plain English: Unsubscriber uses your data for advertising purposes. What data? Basically your entire inbox.
When you give Unsubscriber your name, email address, and password, it connects to your inbox and programmatically indexes the following information, as explained on its Privacy Policy page: Sending Domain and IP Address, Subject line, Message Date, Message Body URLs, redacted and obfuscated non-personal message content, and engagement data points, including whether the email was opened, moved, forwarded, clicked, or marked as spam.
Even if you're okay with sharing domain names, IP addresses, message data, and other metadata with Unsubscriber, are you okay with it deciding what constitutes non-personal message content and what doesn't? What if your idea of personal message content is completely different from Unsubscriber?
In reality, vague privacy policies such as the one used by Unsubscriber is exactly the reason why Gmail changed its Terms of Service to protect its users. Clean Email is fully compliant with new Gmail privacy policy requirements because it doesn't transfer or sell data for purposes such as targeting ads, market research, email campaign tracking, and other unrelated purposes.
In fact, Clean Email never downloads full emails. Instead, its proprietary algorithms analyze only email headers containing subject line, sender and recipient information, dates, email size, and similar metadata. Clean Email stores this non-personal information on its servers only for 45 days to protect its users from data breaches, so you can rest assured knowing your personal email messages aren't collecting dust on some forgotten server that may or may not fall into the wrong hands in the future.
Overall, Clean Email has a much friendlier privacy policy that respects its users and doesn't try to exploit them for profit.
Features
Despite relying solely on metadata, Clean Email is no less capable than Unsubscriber—quite the opposite! In addition to unsubscribing you from newsletters and other unwanted subscriptions, Clean Email can intelligently organize all your emails into easy-to-review bundles, block unwanted senders, and automate the management of your inbox.
Let's take a closer look at some of the most noteworthy features of Clean Email:
- Unsubscriber: Use Unsubscriber the stop marketing emails, newsletters, and other unwanted emails from reaching your inbox. What makes Unsubscriber really smart is its ability to unsubscribe even emails that don't contain an unsubscribe link. It also lets you easily re-subscribe if you change your mind.
- Smart Views: Your inbox most likely contains hundreds if not thousands of emails that you want to delete, move, archive, and otherwise organize. Clean Email can take all your emails and present them to you in easy-to-review bundles called Smart Views, grouping similar emails together by category (Travel, Finance, Social Notifications, Subscriptions and Newsletters, and more) and organizing them by sender, email, subject, time, size, labels or folders, sender, and recipient.
- Quick Clean: If you just want to clean your inbox as quickly as possible, and you're not interested in exploring each and every feature Clean Email has to offer, you can always rely on the Quick Clean option to go through hundreds and thousands of emails at once.
- Auto Clean: With this feature, you can automate your inbox management by applying any action to new or changed emails in your inbox without any manual work. You can think of Auto Clean as a more advanced alternative to traditional email filters, one that's easier to use and more flexible. For example, you can automatically delete emails when they reach a certain age or automatically move emails from social media networks to a dedicated folder. The more you use this feature, the easier your inbox management will become.
Clean Email is verified by Google, Yahoo, and AOL as a trusted application, and it supports all IMAP-based email services, including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, AOL, and others.
Price
Unsubscriber describes itself as a free inbox cleaner, but is it really free or are you paying with something other than your money? The answer is, unfortunately, the latter. In particular, you're paying with your data because Unsubscriber collects your personal information for various purposes, including marketing and e-commerce efforts.
"We collect this data so we can help our clients adopt best email sending practices, optimize delivery of email marketing campaigns to you, help email and Internet service providers improve their spam filters, improve upon our existing Service or to develop a new Service, and help Internet security companies detect and stop phishing attacks," states the privacy policy of the company behind Unsubscriber, Return Path.
As far as price goes, Clean Email takes the opposite approach to Unsubscriber. Instead of making money by selling user data to the highest bidder, Clean Email employs a straightforward subscription model, which completely eliminates the need to sell or rent email addresses or any other personally identifiable or even aggregated information to another company.
One Clean Email account costs either $7.99 a month or $29.99 a year, and large discounts are available to families and businesses that purchase multiple accounts at the same time. There is no fine print to worry about, and users can cancel their subscription at any time—no questions asked.
Customer Support
Shortly after Gmail introduced its new privacy policy, with which Unsubscriber doesn't comply, Unsubscriber's website announced that all customer support had been discontinued indefinitely. "Inquiries submitted to support will no longer be fielded by our team. If you have any questions or issues while using Unsubscriber, please refer to the FAQ," the website stated.
With customer support gone, it's only a matter of time before the company behind Unsubscriber, Return Path, decides to pull the plug on the inbox cleaner. When that happens, all Unsubscriber users will have to look for an alternative.
The good news is that Unsubscriber users can easily switch to Clean Email and instantly enjoy its professional customer support, advanced features, and fair privacy policy. Clean Email has a comprehensive knowledge center that explains all of its features in great detail and includes several useful guides that cover everything from getting rid of social media notifications to removing all emails from a specific sender.
Questions that are not answered in the knowledge center can be sent to Clean Email’s official customer support. Clean Email customer support team answers all emails promptly and comprehensively.
User Reviews
Because Unsubscriber has been discontinued, you won't find any recent user reviews of it on the internet. Most Unsubscriber users have already moved to other inbox cleaners, such as Clean Email. On AlternativeTo, a website with crowdsourced software recommendations, Unsubscriber has only 2 stars out of 5.
On the other hand, Clean Email has received many raving user reviews in the last year alone, with users praising its design, ease of use, advanced inbox cleaning features, affordable pricing, and more. On AlternativeTo, Clean Email has 5 stars out of 5.
How to Use Clean Email as an Alternative to Unsubscriber?
Using Clean Email could hardly be any simpler, and it takes just three simple steps to organize thousands of emails:
- Sign in and let Clean Email analyze your inbox. Keep in mind that Clean Email works with metadata only, which means that the content of your emails remains private.
- Once Clean Email finishes analyzing your emails, it will group them into easy-to-review bundles, allowing you to remove, archive, and do other things with large groups of emails. Working with groups of emails is much faster than selecting them one by one, and it’s also less likely to lead to accidental loss of data because manual email organization is extremely tedious, and those who attempt it are very likely to lose their focus and mistake an important email for spam.
- Every time you apply a certain action, you can instruct Clean Email to automatically apply the same action in the future. Let’s say you have hundreds of emails from one sender that you want to block and never receive again. With Clean Email, all you have to do is make an extra click, and you can say goodbye to both existing as well as any future emails from unwanted senders forever.
How come Clean Email is able to offer all this functionality and fantastic usability without selling users’ data to fund its development? Because it’s a paid app with a subscription business model. One Clean Email account costs either $7.99 a month or $29.99 a year, and large discounts are available to families and businesses that purchase multiple accounts at the same time. There is no fine print to worry about, and users can cancel their subscription at any time—no questions asked.
Conclusion
Not all best things in life are free, and Unsubscriber for Gmail is an excellent example of why it’s sometimes better to spend money on a software tool that can make your life much easier and save you a ton of time. Because Unsubscriber was making money selling users’ data to various third-parties, which is now a big no-no, it no longer works with Gmail, depriving it of a major revenue source and forcing it to stop providing customer support to its users. Fortunately, there is at least one Unsubscriber alternative that does everything Unsubscriber can do and much more: Clean Email.
Not only can Clean Email do everything Unsubscriber can, but it comes with a whole host of additional useful features to help you keep your inbox neat and organized. Thanks to its affordable price, Clean Email is guaranteed to quickly pay for itself and increase your productivity by order of magnitude.
Update: Unsubscriber app from OtherInbox is no longer working for all users.
