The Wirecutter Follow This (Free) Advice Instead: “Achieving inbox zero may feel unattainable. Nowadays, you need an email address for everything from opening a bank account to getting your dog’s nails trimmed, and maintaining an empty inbox can feel like a Sisyphean task. Once you hand over your email address, companies often use it as an all-access pass to your inbox: Think of shopping websites that send account updates, deals, “we miss you” messages, and holiday promotions throughout the year. It’s too much. Email “unsubscription” services offer a tantalizing pledge to eliminate unwanted emails with the press of a button, and they claim to help you avoid the tedious task of deleting individual messages. Yet these services promise more than they deliver. So as annoying as it sounds, you’re probably better off making inbox rules and clicking the Unsubscribe link yourself rather than signing up for a new service. We don’t recommend email unsubscribe services. They ask for payment or your private data in exchange for what we found to be subpar performance. In our testing, it took days or even weeks for us to go from activating one of these services to seeing that translate into tangible results—and even then, we simply got fewer unwanted emails, not zero. The unsubscribe tools we tested create email rules or filters that send unwanted messages to subfolders in your email inbox or simply deposit them in the trash bin, where they take up valuable storage space. Some services claim that they block emails from arriving in your inbox entirely by telling senders that your address is undeliverable. But in our experience, the emails kept coming. Though it takes a bit of work, you can set up the same processes yourself—for free. And we can show you how…”