Anti-Spam App Unsubscribes You From Mailing Lists—and Can Even Get You Paid for the Bother

Keeping newsletters and sale e-blasts from piling up in your inbox can sometimes seem as labor-intensive as weeding a literal garden. And for every mailing list you successfully manage to remove yourself from, there’s another one that you inexplicably end up on.

Fortunately, you can outsource the unsubscribing process to a robot. According to WIRED, the service is available through DoNotPay, an app that helps users dispute parking tickets, claim compensation for airfare, sign up for free trials without using their own credit card information, sue companies in small claims courts, and crawl through a variety of other red tape in the easiest, most automatic way possible.

Instead of figuring out how to unsubscribe to each unwanted email, you just forward the email to spam@donotpay.com, and a bot will do it for you. Unlike similar services, DoNotPay doesn’t require access to your whole email account, and it won’t turn around and sell your data to a third party. What it will do is search to see if there’s a class action settlement against whatever company sent the email—if there is, you can have DoNotPay add your name to it, and you’ll get compensated if you’re eligible.

“When I looked at other spam solutions, either they were selling your data or you still had to give carte blanche access to your email, and it was very expensive,” DoNotPay founder and CEO Joshua Browder told WIRED. “These companies are meant to protect your emails and protect your privacy, and it’s so ironic that they do the exact opposite. So we set out to build a service that doesn’t sell your data and also has this added component of getting compensation by matching you to class action settlements.”

A subscription to DoNotPay costs $3 per month, which includes its entire range of services (in other words, there are plenty of opportunities to earn back more than those few dollars). You can find out more and subscribe here.

[h/t WIRED]