Buried in Spam? There’s a Hidden Trick in Gmail to Make Your Inbox Less Chaotic.

This is One Thing , a column with tips on how to live.

The other day, Slate's VP of technology, Greg Lavallee, dropped a tip into a Slate Slack discussion that immediately changed my life for the better. If you are one of the billion-plus people who use Gmail, there is an extremely easy way to unsubscribe from marketing emails:

In a tab labeled "Manage subscriptions" in the left rail of the Gmail interface, there's a list of all the promotional emails and newsletters that regularly make their way into your inbox. Next to each one is an unsubscribe button. Two clicks, and you're done. (You can also easily see all the emails you've been sent recently by whatever hair-care company or politician, to jog your memory on whether you do actually get value out of them.)

Gmail quietly rolled out the feature in July of 2025. It's funny how the dumbest tech innovations are the ones that make a splash; as of this writing, everyone is correctly up in arms at the admission of the former CEO of Yahoo that she sees value in asking artificial intelligence to surface bullet points on what makes her daughter special; this is a "service" that she is trying to monetize. And yet, what often makes life easier is less tech, not more. I dream of an inbox that contains only messages that I really need to see, for example, not one that keeps me tethered to every brand and political party I've ever come into brief contact with. (I bought one pair of beautiful, eccentric shoes over the summer, and now I am constantly at risk of spending hundreds of dollars more on such shoes, due to marketing emails, and for what?) This won't solve our inbox woes wholesale, but it will, at least, offer an easier path to a little relief.