Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Today, after 9 months of listening to all of your feedback, Leave Me Alone v2.0 is finally here! If you haven’t heard about us yet, Leave Me Alone is a service to easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails, with a focus on privacy and data security.
We launched the first version in January this year and we received an overwhelmingly positive response. Since then we have scanned over 19 million emails, seen over 700k subscriptions, and unsubscribed people from over 200k of them!
This version was somewhat quietly released in July, but we have made even more improvements since then. The core product is still the same service you know and love, but we've rebuilt everything from the ground up to be faster, more resilient, and more effective at unsubscribing you. This post is a breakdown of the new and improved Leave Me Alone!
Featured in Lifehacker!
Our home page now proudly shows that Leave Me Alone was featured in Lifehacker and Fast Company this year! We have also been featured in other publications which you can see on our news page. These articles gave us a huge boost in sales and social shares, more people are talking about us, and Leave Me Alone is growing!
Multiple email provider support
We've added support for all your inboxes including Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, FastMail, AOL, and Yahoo. Plus, we've introduced IMAP support so you can connect any other inbox you might have. You can attach all of your email addresses to a single Leave Me Alone account and deal with all those subscriptions together!
Scoring subscriptions
Using aggregated anonymous usage data we've created an algorithm called Subscription Score. We score each mailing list you receive based on the following:
- how frequently it's been seen before
- how many times it's been unsubscribed from
- how many addresses they send from
- how many emails they send each month
- many other data points
Using this information combined with some secret sauce algorithms, we give each email a rank from A to F, so you can instantly see if it's worth keeping.
Credits to unsubscribe
Unlike our competitors, we've always charged a fee for unsubscribing you. This is how you know we don't need to sell your data in order to keep afloat. With v2.0 we've made our payment system fairer and easier to understand - now we only charge based on which emails you want to unsubscribe from. You can buy credit packages starting at $2.50 for 50 credits, all the way up to $10.50 for 300 credits.
If you aren't sure how many credits to buy then you can find out how many you might need by using our estimator on the new pricing page!
Better user experience
We have a brand new and improved UI which makes unsubscribing even easier. You can now filter your mail by email address and status (subscribed, unsubscribed, or failed), sort by date received or score, and navigate using the new pagination.
You don’t need to do all of your unsubscribing in one go. Your mail list will now be kept up-to-date with your inboxes so that each time you log in your new subscription emails will be ready to view.
We have also made everything more compact so you can see more mail on each page, show you whether it was seen in spam or trash, and added more details about each email. Plus, we now have a report feature for senders who are still sending you emails after you unsubscribed!
More secure login
You can now sign up and log in using email and password for better privacy, and add two-factor authentication for extra security! If you signed up with Google and Microsoft you can switch your account to password login from the security settings page.
If you want to connect Fastmail, iCloud, AOL, Yahoo, or IMAP accounts you need to have a password account. This is because we want to keep your IMAP credentials as secure as possible and the best way to do this is by encrypting your information using the password you log in with.
Even more open and transparent
We take security and data privacy very seriously at Leave Me Alone. We have a page dedicated to data and security where we are completely transparent about:
- What permissions we request when you sign in using Google or Microsoft
- How we power our statistics and Subscription Score algorithms
- How to revoke permissions and deactivate your account at any time
- Our commitment to you and our security features
Unsubscribe from CO₂ emissions
We recently participated in a challenge to help fix the climate. During research we discovered that unwanted emails contributed a whopping 986,000 tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere every day! So we implemented a way to see how much carbon you can offset by unsubscribing. Check it out here. As well as this, we partnered with One Tree Planted to let all users donate an extra $1 when purchasing credits to plant a tree!
New landing page
We have completely redesigned our home page to make everything more clean and simple, with a focus on social validation and testimonials.
The core features that we provide are the focus of the landing page. We now have separate pages where you can learn more about how it works, read about our security, find out what package you might need, read about us in the news, check out our Leave Me Alone for Teams, and discover more about us and our mission.
We love our customers
Our Wall of Love is no longer a collection of tweets! We now have a showcase of official testimonials from our awesome customers. You can read about how we gather testimonials and built our Wall of Love here.
You can now find us at .app
Update your bookmarks and start sharing our new URL leavemealone.app! We asked you about how much you trust an app using our previous .xyz domain, and we received over a thousand votes in favor of switching to .app. We still love .xyz for prototyping and idea validation, but we have moved to a more recognised domain (especially outside the tech community) to help our reputation as we grow.
None of this would have been possible without the continued support of every single one of you. Your feedback has helped to shape Leave Me Alone into a product that people love, and that helps people every day. We are still growing, and we still need your support and feedback going forward.
Our long term plans for Leave Me Alone are centered around our mission statement, to help people keep control of their inbox. We want to stop the current reactive response to our inboxes - the never ending cycle of unsubscribing to keep control, and shift to being proactive - helping users avoid subscribing to unwanted mailing lists in the first place.
It would really, really help us if you could share Leave Me Alone and help to spread the word, anywhere and everywhere.
As always, please reach out on Twitter if you have any questions, feedback, suggestions, or want to say hello.
Enjoy your clean inboxes!
Danielle & James
