What the Tech: How Gmail’s new tool cleans out inbox clutter

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - If your inbox is full every morning, you might have a mailing list infestation.

It starts innocently enough. You give a store your email address for a discount or free shipping. You enter it to read an article or download something. Before long, your inbox becomes everyone else’s advertising space.

Gmail has a tool that makes it easier to cut back.

Called Manage subscriptions, it brings subscription emails together so you can review the senders and unsubscribe without digging through individual messages.

Find out who’s filling your inbox

On a computer, open Gmail and look in the menu on the left. Click More, then Manage subscriptions.

Gmail shows subscription senders and how many messages they’ve sent recently, with the most frequent senders appearing first. When I checked mine, Experian was sending me three or four marketing emails a day.

You can review the list and decide which emails you actually want to keep.

Unsubscribe from the ones you don’t want

Click Unsubscribe beside a sender and follow the prompts. You’ll still work through the senders individually, but having them together makes the job easier.

Some senders require you to visit their website to finish unsubscribing. Gmail may offer a Go to website option or let you block the sender instead.

Blocking isn’t the same as unsubscribing

Unsubscribing asks the sender to remove you from its mailing lists. Blocking sends future messages from that address to your Spam folder. The company can still send them.

Give unsubscribe requests a few days to take effect. You may receive additional messages while the company processes your request.

And unsubscribing won’t clean out the messages already sitting in your inbox. You’ll need to delete those separately.

If you don’t see Manage subscriptions, Google says the feature is still gradually rolling out and may not be available to your account yet.

A few minutes spent reviewing the list could mean a lot less sorting tomorrow morning. Just remember that the next time a store asks for your email address.