Stop That Email

The first users just signed up to the monthly plan at $3. It's not going to keep the lights on by itself but it's a cause for celebration.

I don't have any proper analytics which means it's tough to tell which channel they came from although my current guess is BetaList as it was a few days after it was featured and I've not marketed it the app at all apart from that.

I had totally forgotten I had submitted Stop That Email to BetaList until it was featured as it takes a while. Some quick stats:

• 415 hits on the homepage
• 61 hits to the pricing page
• 30 hits to the how it works page
• 14 likes on BetaList

More importantly, we jumped to around 65 users meaning we have dealt with quite a few different emails now. Great for improving the service.

The homepage is up - Stop That Email

If you are reading this and hate unsubscribing from emails you can sign up for the beta for free at app.stopthat.email

I'm only posting this link on IH for now. I've opened the site up to a beta instead of going live as I want to ensure the automatic unsubscribe magic works for a broad range of emails which I just can't do on my own.

If you have any questions please get hold of me on IH, via my email in my profile or via the Stop This Email contact page

The idea is to build something which allows me to unsubscribe to emails easily, without risk from spam, just by forwarding emails.

I like it but it's 100% a side project. Email spam isn't a problem that everyone has and I'm not sure there is a massive market for it, so I need to keep it cheap to run and easy to manage.

The idea is to:

• Run on serverless (Fargate or Lambda) so I don't have to manage infrastructure
• Keep the database safe but cost down using Amazon Aurora serverless
• Prove out the problem ASAP - let's make sure it works how I imagine it

I've been working on PKG Deploy for a few months and was just the beta ready. The last step was to hook up my app to Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to send emails, something I had not done before.

Then I saw it. SES allows you to easily receive emails and drop them into an S3 bucket. Awesome.

My brain instantly jumped back to my idea about unsubscribing to emails. The one bit I was not sure about how to implement had suddenly become easy. I knew what I was going to do while waiting for feedback from my beta testers.

One of my email addresses that I use frequently is quite old. Not that old but I've had it for around 20 years now and that's long enough to find itself on more than a few email lists. Some of these lists are from websites I signed up to when I was younger and my tastes were different but most them are just plain old spammers that have found my email around the web or in data breaches.

All this means I get quite a few unwanted emails and spam into my inbox. At first, I just deleted it but then it kept on coming back so I took to unsubscribing to everything. Well not everything, I didn't want to touch the obvious spam as clicking on emails has always been a bad idea and clicking on links in them (even to unsubscribe) is even worse.

Unsubscribing worked well for the emails I did it for and helped clean up my inbox a little but it took quite a bit of time. In fact, I had not realised I was spending 1 morning a month just going through all of my mail trying to unsubscribe to different emails. And the spam still wasn't gone no matter how often I marked it as such.

I looked at some unsubscription services but they all appeared to require you to give up your whole email account and all your emails. Something I didn't want to do.

This got my thinking... what rules did I have? I came up with:

• Keep my emails private - I don't want to give anyone access to all of my emails
• Unsubscribe instantly - I didn't want to have to lose focus on what I was doing in my inbox by having to open emails, find links and fill out forms
• Unsubscribe the same way each time - Different emails have different ways of opting out and this takes mental load. I want to do it the same way for every email
• Unsubscribe to spam without risk - I didn't want to open spam emails but I wanted to opt-out of them
• Keep track of what I had unsubscribed to - I wanted to have a list of emails I had unsubscribed to so I knew if companies were respecting my opt-outs.
• Unsubscribe easily on my mobile - It's always harder to unsubscribe on mobile where buttons are small and data is slow

I had a look around for a service which fit the bill but couldn't find it. And to be honest, I didn't know what I was looking for, how can someone else unsubscribe to an email without me giving them access to my emails?

After thinking about it for a while it hit me. Just forward the damn email to an automated system and let that deal with it. The only issue I have is I've never really dealt with receiving emails programmatically. Well, it was one for the ideas list.