unsubscan

A tool to help you find unsubscribe links in your emails

About

I created unsubscan because I think that anyone should be able to quickly and easily look at their emails and:

• Unsubscribe from whatever they want
• Unsubscribe whenever they want
• Unsubscribe for free
• Unsubscribe without yet another subscription service
• Unsubscribe without having to give another company access to their emails
• Unsubscribe without having to forward emails to other companies

Installation

Pre-compiled binaries of the latest release will be made available on the Releases page of this repository.

If you are using Windows, it is strongly recommended to install using the Scoop package manager to avoid issues with Windows Defender mistakenly blocking the zip file that is made available for download on the Releases page.

scoop bucket add extras
scoop install unsubscan

Alternatively, you may also compile this project from source if you have a working Rust development environment:

git clone https://github.com/LGUG2Z/unsubscan.git
cd unsubscan
cargo install --path .

Preparing your emails

Option 1: Get an archive of your emails from your provider as .eml files

Export your emails as an archive of .eml files from your provider. Instructions on how to do this with different email providers are below:

• FastMail
• Proton Mail
• ZohoMail

Once downloaded, extract the archive of emails to a new folder.

Option 2: Save your emails as .eml files using Thunderbird

If you host your email with a provider that does not provide exported archives of your emails as .eml files (e.g. Gmail), you can use Thunderbird (or any desktop email client that allows you to save your emails as .eml files) to do this yourself.

Select the desired subset of emails that you wish to scan (or all of them, if you'd like), and then select File -> Save As -> File from the menu bar to save them to a new folder.

How it works

If you are running on a system that allows you to drag a folder directly onto an application to use that folder as an input (e.g. dragging and dropping a folder from Explorer onto an exe file on Windows), then all you have to drag is drag your folder of emails on top of the unsubscan executable.

If you are more comfortable on the command line, you can also call the binary with the path to your extracted folder of .eml files as the sole argument.

unsubscan 0.1.0
A tool to help you find unsubscribe links in your emails

USAGE:
    unsubscan [OPTIONS] <DIRECTORY>

ARGS:
    <DIRECTORY>    Directory of EML files to scan for unsubscribe links

OPTIONS:
        --debug              Enable debug logging
    -h, --help               Print help information
    -o, --output <OUTPUT>    The format in which to output scanned unsubscribe links [default: html]
                             [possible values: html, json]
    -V, --version            Print version information

The folder will be scanned for unsubscribe links and when the scanning is complete, an HTML page will open in your default browser with a complete list of all the links found and further instructions and explanations.

If you are running unsubscan from the command line, you may also optionally receive the output in JSON format.

Contributing

Please feel free to open a PR with links explaining how to export emails as .eml files with other email providers.

Please also feel free to make the binary releases available for installation via package managers on other operating systems.

I am not interested in adding MBOX support myself, but I will be happy to review and eventually accept a PR that adds this functionality.