We’ve written about Unroll.me, a service that helps users manage their junk email and subscriptions, before — most recently when it was redesigned in April. Now the company is sharing some stats about its growth.
For one thing, it says it has more than 100,000 subscribers. It also says that more than 106 million emails have been diverted from inboxes thanks to Unroll.me’s “unsubscribe” feature, and that more than 225 million emails have been summarized in Unroll.me’s digest emails. CEO and co-founder Josh Rosenwald said the company hasn’t paid for any marketing, so all that growth has been word-of-mouth. In fact, he said the Unroll.me team has focused almost entirely on the technology, rather than growth, until now — though that will start changing “now that we’re kind of hitting a groove.”
The service first launched in beta in June 2012 and came out of beta in June of this year. There are other services that try to sift the genuinely personal content in your inbox from things like marketing emails, newsletter subscriptions, and social network notifications — they include OtherInbox (which was acquired by Return Path last year) and Gmail’s new tabbed interface. However, co-founder and CTO Jojo Hedaya said those services are trying to reinvent the email client, while the Unroll.me team thinks “the email client is just fine.”
So instead of trying to create a whole new interface for navigating your email, Unroll.me just aggregates your graymail into a single, daily email, with short previews of each mail — you only open the messages that you’re genuinely interested in. And you can manage your subscriptions through the Unroll.me site, adding emails to the daily “rollup” and unsubscribing from the ones you really don’t want.