Have you ever signed up for a product or service only to be bombarded by useless marketing and subscription emails? - Subscription Score is a browser extension that allows you to see the reputation of mailing lists *before* you give them your email address.
Hey Product Hunt!
It's Danielle & James here, makers of Leave Me Alone - the Golden Kitty side project of the year 2019!
It's been just over a year since we launched Leave Me Alone to the world on Product Hunt, and since then we've had nearly 20,000 users, and have seen over 1,200,000 subscription emails.
π€ The story βοΈ
Leave Me Alone was designed as a way to help users take back control of their email accounts from subscription spam, but in mid-2019 we begun to realize that we were in a unique situation to help further.
What if by using the metadata of subscriptions we saw, we could create a system to identify good and bad mailing lists? π€
πββοΈ The validation πββοΈ
We built and trialed this functionality within Leave Me Alone, ending in our v2.0 launch late last year. The ranking system was well received, and from within the app our users could now see which emails were worth keeping and which were not.
Our initial intention was simply to help our Leave Me Alone users. However, we quickly realized we could take this concept further and find a way to help users not just take back, but keep control of their mailboxes.
π― The solution β
Introducing Subscription Score, a browser extension that identifies bad mailing lists associated with the webpage you are on, and notifies you if you almost give away your email address to them.
Using our extension you can now possess all the facts before you choose to subscribe.
π£ FAQ π»
We've been lucky to have a great group of beta users who have helped us by asking hard questions and putting the extension through it's paces. Here are some of our answers...
β Where does the data for the score come from?
When people use Leave Me Alone we store some metadata about subscription emails we see including unsubscribe rate, frequency and a few other statistics. All of this data goes into the mixing bowl with our unique algorithm to generate a score. From the scores we derive a percentile rank from A+ to F. We don't pretend that the algorithm is perfect, but we are working on improving it every day, so it will get better!
β What makes a good mailing list?
We expect a mailing list with a good score to have a low unsubscribe rate (indicating high quality & relevant content), and an easy unsubscribe process. Mailing lists wont necessarily be penalized for a high number of sent emails, so long as the quality is high.
β How often are scores updated?
Scores are currently recalculated every day.
β Will you share the algorithm?
Nooo, right now we think that sharing the algorithm will not be in the best interest of users, as that information could be abused. Though we might change our minds about this in the future. It will however be constantly evolving as we try to provide the most accurate information. We have also open-sourced the extension code so we can be as transparent in our approach in possible. You can also suggest changes from within the extension settings if you feel a score is drastically wrong.
More questions? Please ask below!
β Special thanks β
- Thanks to @aaronoleary for hunting us again!
- Thank you @iamarnob and @mshra_ji for creating us an amazing logo GIF! We love you guys!
- Thanks sooooo much to all our Leave Me Alone users, we couldn't be here without you β€οΈ
- Thanks to our amazing beta testers, you don't know how much you help us get ready for launch π
π€ And a BIG thanks to all Product Hunt users again for being there with us every step along the way! This time we'd like to offer you a huge 50% discount when you purchase a yearly license. This discount will be active for the next 24 hours only! β°
Aaaand that's my comment done, now it's your turn! We'll be here all day to answer questions! We look forward to hearing them, and as always ENJOY YOUR CLEAN INBOX! ππ ββοΈ
Congrats on the launch! Big fan of the two of you as an indie maker/digital nomad couple πͺ
Questionβ do you tailor these suggestions individually over time? For instance, in the screenshot above, the Pinterest email (A+) would be something I'd unsubscribe from while the email with the 25% off coupon code (D) would definitely be of interest to me.
@lunchbag Thanks!
We don't currently tailor the suggestions, it's not really something we were thinking of doing because we don't really want to profile users. Though if it's something that a few people bring up then we could re-think this approach.
However, something that does happen right now is that your interactions with the extension feed back into the algorithm. So for example if many people say that Pinterest is an okay mailing list then it's score will improve over time.
So you can only score a mailing list if you have it in your original app? Also many people need to subscribe to the mailing list in order to get a reliable score, correct?
@kensavage The original data comes from Leave Me Alone yes, we have data on around 500,000 mailing lists. There is a data threshold, above which we start generating scores.
So if we don't have enough data regarding a list then it wont yet have a score.
@mshra_ji@iamarnob6543 srsly I never want to launch anything without an awesome animated gif from you two <3
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Back by popular demand, the Leave Me Alone team has launched a new product....
They MAY have outdone themselves again with this handy little extension. Subscription Score has been helping me cut down on unwanted newsletter overload before it ever happens!
Enjoy the well deserved celebratory πΎon yet another great product launch @jamesivings@dinkydani21 :)
Great data representation -- no one in a usual occasion would want to view more than the four key data points you highlight with colored titles. And a list of scores along the letters in inbox is a nice way to provide an overview. E.g. if I'd see that most of my letters are F, I'd want to clean up a bit. Hope this feature is easily disabled though! Wouldn't want to get distracted when I'm already happy with my inbox.
Looking forward to more useful features after you get some initial feedback!
@valentine_erokhin Thanks so much! Quite a bit of iteration went into it.
The Gmail setting is off by default and needs to be enabled, so it wont get in your way π
Love this! Have shared with an email guy I know and bookmarked. Hope to buy. Very exciting idea.
One question I have is about quantity of data. To put a real world figure on it, how big does the email list have to be for this to be statistically significant?
For example for my own Marketing Examples email list, I have around 12.3k subscribers. Do you know how many data points you have on that list to get a score from?
Or perhaps the product designed for bigger lists.
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