• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, November 4, 2022

Edison Mail is at it again. The email app has added new ways to eliminate unwanted emails -- including those that are legitimate. 

The company has released an update to its iOS and Android apps, including a tool called New Subscriptions Insights.  

This provides automatic measurement of which email subscriptions a person opens most and least, and offers a scorecard to determine which ones should be opted out of.  

Another feature -- Timed Subscription Summary -- enables recipients to schedule a curated list of email subscriptions to arrive when they want, skipping all notifications in between.  

The Edison app has also been offering a rapid unsubscribe -- described by the company as a process where with just one tap, “both request an Unsubscribe from an email sender and command all previous and future unwanted email subscriptions to automatically be sent to your Trash so they never take up space in your inbox again.”

Then there is Subscription Manager, which allows the user to review their personalized list of email subscriptions they are currently subscribed to or have previously unsubscribed from across all accounts in an “intuitive split screen.” 

Marketers might question if these tools are necessary or wise, given that spam folders already exist.  

Edison Mail justifies it this way. Anyone who has “felt the pain of cleaning out their inbox from spam every day will appreciate and immediately benefit from our new subscription insights and timed summary functionality,” says Jeff Pearsall, vice president of design for Edison Mail.

It depends on how you define spam. Is it malware-bearing phishing or legitimate email that just happen to annoy a person at the wrong time, even though they probably subscribed?

Then there's the question of how easy unsubscribe functions are to use. author Kath Pay, CEO at Holistic Email Marketing, recently studied 12 brands, and found that UK brands offer a smoother process than U.S. ones, although both could stand improvement. One-click unsubscribes are more prevalent among UK brands, Pay writes on Martech.o
Pay also determined that "U.S. brands put unsubscribers through more steps but gave subscribers more options." Unfortunately, most brands still play hide-and-seek with the email unsub link."

One way around the rolling unsubscribes offered by Edison Mail might be to deploy BIMI (brand indicators for message identification). Brand logos can shown in DMARC-authenticated emails.

Another way is to simply be careful and to send emails based on real-time behavior and level of interest. 

“Consumers have always hated clutter in their inbox,” says Ryan Phelan, managing partner,  RPE Origin. “That’s why we’ve seen moves by the major providers to take some of the sorting out of their hands.”  

“Marketers have to realize that the more and more we see digital transformation, consumers will expect that transformation to extend to the inbox. We must get smarter or tabs is just the first thing we will see," Phelan says.