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In a world where there are thousands of tools for marketers and sellers to send you emails, where more products are available to try, where sellers can email you at any time, your inbox is probably looking like a total mess. It’s overwhelming just how many emails hit your inbox. And 'how to block unwanted emails' is something that professionals around the globe are asking.
Why is there such pain in email? Why are people desperate for solutions? On average, the U.S. professional receives 71 emails every workday. The average executive role receives even more than that - getting an average of 87 emails per workday. That turns out to nearly 435 per week. (Reference: Inbox Intelligence Report, October 2022) And in the face of this flood of email, you probably aren’t surprised that people are desperate for ways how to block emails. In the recent Inbox Intelligence Report from Gated (in partnership with Centiment), it was found that people try all sorts of things to make the flood of email stop including:
All of this effort is in search of an answer to the common question: How do I stop unwanted emails? You and I want to block emails that are irrelevant or unwanted, but we don’t know where to start.
Google is well aware of the fact that we all get too much email. They’ve put millions of dollars into improving their spam functionality in particular, knowing what is legitimate email and not, in an effort of blocking unwanted email. But those numbers of average daily emails above? Those numbers are AFTER the spam is pulled out by Google’s spam filters. We still have too much.
And so you might have tried things like Multiple Inboxes as a way how to stop unwanted emails in gmail, keeping things like promotional or social emails in a separate inbox. But they keep piling up don’t they? Some of those emails that get past spam filtering by google are still just bad, or irrelevant, or really awful sales pitches. We’ve all received sales emails from someone selling who never took the time to even know who you are, or - even worse - calls you by the wrong name or leaves your name in parentheses because they were too lazy to do a mail merge. It’s offensive. It should even make you angry that you have to be the one to do the work.
It shouldn’t be up to you to figure out how to block an email address on gmail that is sending such utterly irrelevant messages. And when you do use the block email functionality, which Google has put into Gmail and Google Workspace, you only are able to do that after you are distracted by, open, and find the drop down option to do so. It’s a lot of work just to stop an email from someone who didn’t have to put in a drop of work when they were sending it.
Now instead of blocking emails, many people ask the question: How to unsubscribe from emails? This means that instead of blocking a sender completely, you are clicking the option that tells a sender - and legally obligates a sender - to stop emailing you and not to do do again in the future. Emails from marketers and sellers are legally obligated to have a link at the bottom of their email that allows you to click ‘unsubscribe’ and remove yourself from their lists.
However, as we wrote about in an article from our CEO, Andy Mowat, it can actually be dangerous and open up your information to be scraped by sellers if you do that. When you take action to click the unsubscribe button on a marketing or sales email, you are indicating that you are a real, live human on the end of that email. That means that aggressive or bad-intentioned senders will actually record that on their end and likely send you even more marketing emails. Their bots will know that you are a human and actively able to click, and so you may find yourself the target of ongoing, unscrupulous marketing tactics over email.
If you are wondering how to unsubscribe from emails on gmail, the best way to do this would be to use a third-party unsubscribe tool which serves the purpose of making you and your email address more anonymous in this process. You do, however, have to share your information with the third-party service (like unroll.me) and unfortunately some of these businesses have come into legal issues over the last few years as well. It’s very hard to keep your data safe and stay “hidden” from senders completely at this point. Instead, we believe that it’s time to just admit that all marketers and sellers are likely to have your address, so it’s time to protect yourself in a different, innovative, future-looking way.
Whether you’re asking ‘how to block emails?’ Or ‘how to unsubscribe from emails?’ The core intent of your questions is really the same: How can I stop seeing unsolicited emails? It’s not that you want to stop using email or getting valuable emails. It’s that the emails that are unsolicited, unwanted, and irrelevant are blocking you from seeing the messages that truly matter to you - and your business. In fact, did you know that after a single distraction (including a distracting email), it has been proven that it takes ~23 minutes on average to refocus!
So instead of dealing with the mess… we should be looking for ways to deal with the root cause of the problem. We should be looking for solutions for how to stop unwanted emails overall instead of just hiding them, or doing more work to get rid of them by blocking or unsubscribing. The ideal thing would be to find a system that doesn’t let the messages in to distract you - or pull you out of your day. You can read more about how Senior Engineering Manager at Calendly, Rob Wilson, found a solution called Gated that allowed him to finally focus and avoid distractions.
This world is exceedingly noisy, and our senses are being overloaded with distractions, notifications, and advertisements throughout the day. In particular, it's the desire to remove emails from unknown senders that busy professionals are looking todo. In response to this need, the team at Gated wrote and published our fundamental principles to build the foundation for a world where we’re not just moving around the mess of inbound email, but actually stopping it all together. They are listed in our Manifesto but go like this.:
1) You should determine who can reach you. We believe every individual (not just those who can pay $30 a month for fancy tools) should be able to remove distractions in email and focus on what matters to them.
2) You should decide what your attention is worth and who benefits.
3) Charging unknown senders a small cost leads to better connections. In fact, more than half of people believe there is value to be had in cold inbound email from unknown senders, but it’s about removing the unwanted sales emails, the ones from people who don’t care at all about your time, or even from “bots.”