Issue 1 - Email news worth knowing, once a month. Starting now
Welcome to the very first Inbox Detox Newsletter! We think about email all day so you don’t have to. Once a month, we’ll send you the parts worth knowing: what’s changing in your inbox, the privacy stuff that actually matters, and the odd thing that made us laugh.
Yes, we know the irony of emailing you about having fewer emails! We’ll keep it to once a month, we promise!
Here’s what caught our eye this month.
AI is writing the scams now
Google put out a warning this month: the dodgy emails landing in your inbox are increasingly written by AI. No more broken English or obvious typos. They’re polished, personal, and some even sneak fake “payment failed” notices straight into your calendar.
The takeaway? You can’t always spot a scam by how it reads anymore. The fewer unknown senders you let in, the safer you are.
24 billion records just leaked. Yours might be in there
A single data dump this week held 24 billion stolen records, including email addresses, passwords, and login cookies. It’s a good nudge to do the boring but important stuff: stop reusing passwords, and turn on two-factor authentication everywhere you can.
And remember, every newsletter you’ve ever signed up for is one more place your address can leak from. Fewer subscriptions means a smaller target.
More people are quietly leaving Gmail
Proton Mail added a way to read your Gmail from inside its own app, so you can drift away from Google without changing your address everywhere at once. Whether or not you switch, it’s a sign of the times. People want their inbox back.
Gmail’s getting stricter about unsubscribing
Gmail now shows you a list of who you’re subscribed to and how often they email you, and senders have to honour a one-click unsubscribe within two days. It’s a great start.
We’ll just gently note that we’ve been doing this across every inbox for years, and we actually check the unsubscribe went through!
The invisible tracking in your inbox is under fire
France’s privacy regulator ruled that tracking pixels need your explicit permission. Those are the tiny invisible images that quietly tell a sender when you opened their email, how many times, and roughly where you were. Expect more of Europe to follow.
It’s nice to see something we’ve always felt strongly about going mainstream.
New From Us
Meet the Spam Blocker!
Some spam slips past even Gmail and Outlook. So this month we shipped the Spam Blocker. Flip it on, and the moment junk lands in your inbox it gets moved straight to your Spam folder.
It’s trained on live global spam trends, so it keeps up as the junk changes. It also replaces our old blocklists. Your custom blocklist and unsubscribe blocklist are still there, just tucked into tabs on the new Spam Blocker page.
That’s it for this month. If a tidier, safer inbox sounds good right about now, you know we can help with that!
See you next month,
Founder of Leave Me Alone
