Gmail is one of the most popular apps and services in the world, and with good reason. Google’s email service is totally free, easy to use, and works on any device, whether it’s a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android phone or tablet.
That Gmail is easy to use is also down to its relative simplicity, with the online interface rarely changing and, aside from the recent introduction of AI tools, new features don’t come along too often.
But Google has decided that enough is enough when it comes to one of the worst aspects of email, and is pushing out a free update to all Gmail users that attempts to remedy it.
Soon, your Gmail is set to gain a new “Manage subscriptions” feature that Google says will let you “view and manage your subscription emails, making it easy to unsubscribe from the ones you no longer want all from a single place.”
This is being set up to help Gmail users deal with the perennial problem of email spam. From the clothes shop you had to give your email to to get a receipt or the supermarket that got your address from your loyalty card, businesses pepper us with useless emails all the time, often meaning we miss actually important emails from loved ones.
“It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subscription emails clogging your inbox: Daily deal alerts that are basically spam, weekly newsletters from blogs you no longer read, promotional emails from retailers you haven’t shopped in years can quickly pile up,” Google’s Gmail Director Chris Doan said in a blog post.
He said the new view, which is rolling out now for web, iOS and Android in “select countries” will exist as an option in the navigation bar found in the top left corner of your inbox.
The tool claims to find your active subscriptions sorted by the most frequent senders, even pointing out how many emails these email addresses have sent you recently. From this page, you’ll be able to unsubscribe with one click, which prompts Gmail to send an unsubscribe request to the sender.
If it works, this could finally mean you don’t have to dig into every spam email and scroll around to find the usually tiny or hidden unsubscribe link.
“Gmail has always worked to keep unwanted emails out of your inbox,” Doan said. “Our requirements for senders and tools like one-click unsubscribe give you even more control to choose and actually stop getting emails you no longer want.
“Alongside our efforts to keep inboxes safe, we’ve also prioritized giving users even more control over the messages they want to receive. Gmail blocks more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing and malware, and we’ve recently rolled out new AI-based defenses which cut scam emails by 35 percent.”
