Introducing our new browser extension for scoring mailing lists - Subscription Score

At the Leave Me Alone headquarters, we have been working on something new that is going to make it even easier to keep control of your mailboxes.

Want to skip straight to the product? Check out Subscription Score here!

Read on for more details about what we have been making and how it can help you!

The why

Leave Me Alone was designed as a way to help users take back control of their email accounts from subscription spam, but in mid-2019 we began to realise that we were in a unique situation to help further.

Most of our customers come to us with their mailboxes overflowing with unwanted spam and subscription emails. Leave Me Alone is a life-line - we give people a way finally get rid of all of the pesky newsletters that plague them daily.

It’s easy to unsubscribe using Leave Me Alone, but we wanted to make the decision making process easier. With thousands of emails to sift through, we came up with a way for customers to quickly identify good and bad mailing lists.

The how

Our solution was a new ranking system where we scored mailing lists from A to F. We built and tried this within Leave Me Alone and it was well received - customers could now quickly see which emails were worth keeping, and clean our their bursting mailboxes much faster.

Our intention with this new feature was simply to help our Leave Me Alone customers. However, we quickly realised we could take this concept further and find a way to help users not just take back, but keep control of their mailboxes.

With this goal we started working on making our ranking system its own product that could help people outside of Leave Me Alone. We wanted people to be able to see mailing list scores everywhere it could be useful, either to stop the acquisition of spam, or to help them unsubscribe from it.

The what

Introducing Subscription Score, our brand new browser extension that identifies bad mailing lists associated with the webpage you are on!

Subscription Score is a powerful way to make sure you stay in control of your mailboxes. You can see the mailing list score for any website you visit, and we’ll even notify you if you are about to give away your mail to a spammy sender and check you are sure before subscribing.

Plus, you can even see mailing list scores alongside the emails in your Gmail mailboxes!

Using our extension you can now possess all the facts before you choose to subscribe.

The questions

We've been lucky to have a great group of beta users who have helped us by asking hard questions and putting the extension through its paces. Here are the answers to our most frequently asked questions:

Where does the data for the score come from?

When people use Leave Me Alone we store some metadata about subscription emails we see. This includes unsubscribe rate, send frequency, and a few other statistics. This data is purely statistical, and never user-identifiable information.

This data is put together with our secret sauce algorithm to generate a score. From the scores we derive a percentile rank from A+ to F. We don't pretend that the algorithm is perfect, but we are working on improving it every day, so it will get better!

What makes a good mailing list?

We expect a mailing list with a good score to have a low unsubscribe rate (indicating high quality & relevant content) and an easy unsubscribe process. Mailing lists won't necessarily be penalized for a high number of sent emails, so long as the quality is high.

How often are scores updated?

Scores are currently recalculated every day.

Will you share the algorithm?

Nope! We don’t think that sharing the algorithm will be in the best interest of users, as that information could be abused. It will however be constantly evolving as we try to provide the most accurate information. The extension code is open-source so we can be as transparent in our approach as possible. You can also suggest changes from within the extension if you feel that a score is drastically wrong.

You can get Subscription Score for Chrome and Firefox today!

We are really excited to help you in the battle against unwanted emails. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback - we can’t wait to hear your thoughts.