Swizzle: Clear Your Inbox and Grab a Daily Deal

Right now, I have 6,500 e-mails sitting in my inbox. A lot of these e-mails I need to keep, but a lot more are simply taking up space. Many of the 'weeds' in my inbox are made up of subscription e-mails that I just haven't gotten around to unsubscribing from.

When it comes down to it, I just don't have time to go through each one and unsubscribe... until now.

This is because I found Swizzle -- an online platform that searches through your inbox for every e-mail list you've ever subscribed to and then gives you a chance to either unsubscribe from each one with one click, or move them into a single digest e-mail.

When you're done, choose from a number of popular high profile brands, such as J. Crew, Home Depot, Patagonia and Nordstrom, and get daily deals from each in convenient daily digest e-mail.
Before being acquired in June 2012 by the New York-based Keep Holdings -- known for Adkeeper, an online platform that allows users to keep web ads for future use -- Swizzle was Unsubscribr.com, a platform developed by Ninth Peak Industries out of Denver, Colorado.

The tool is the brainchild of Adam Novinska, Keep Holdings current CTO and a former Microsoft developer and consultant who began to notice a glut of subscription e-mails crowding his and his fiancée's inbox as soon as they began to plan their wedding.

"His lovely wife Kristen, signed up for one of those online wedding planning services and in order for her to complete her sign-up, she had to enter her fiancée's email address and the minute she did that, the two of them started receiving emails upon emails from every wedding vendor in America," says MaryAnn Bekkedahl, president and co-founder of Keep Holdings.

So, Novinska took matters into his own hands, working weekends in January to create what would first be called Unsubscribr and then, after the June acquisition, Swizzle. "We just wanted something fun and nonsensical," says Bekkedahl about the current name. "So we started scouring the domains for something we liked and something that sounded fun and Swizzle fit the bill. If you think about it, Swizzle sticks stir up your drink and we're kind of stirring up your email."

If they are stirring up your e-mail, they're certainly doing it in a variety of different ways. "We discovered that e-mail is the number one way that people let the brands that they like into their lives," says Bekkedahl. In fact, 79% of people prefer e-mail for brand communication. A distant second, at 9%, is direct mail or text and in third place is connection through Facebook and Twitter.

"As we were building our brand daily digest email program, we started seeing all of these unsubscribe tools out there and we thought, Wouldn't it be great if we could do the whole thing? The girls at the office joke, 'it's like cleaning out your closet and then putting the things you want back in all clean and orderly,'" says Bekkedahl. "That's the idea, we first were building a better way for consumers to engage with their brand e-mail and then we added the unsubscribe piece."

But the unsubscribe tool -- now known as Swizzle Sweeper -- doesn't always come down to one click and you're done, sometimes it takes a little more effort. "Most senders actually comply completely with U.S. CAN-SPAM laws, which requires the unsubscribe action to be very easy for the user," says Bekkedahl.

"So, most senders allow you to click the unsubscribe button and you're done, some senders make you flip over to their page because they want to suck you back in, but they're not breaking CAN-SPAM law because it's still easy to unsubscribe. However, there's a third group of senders who actively break CAN-SPAM law by making you enter your password, enter your e-mail address again or do some kind of input. This is illegal and those are bad guys."

Right now, all Swizzle does is take the place of the user by pushing the unsubscribe button for you and as a result, you are sometimes ported over to the sender's website to take further action to unsubscribe, but, Bekkedahl promises that future versions of Swizzle will make it so every unsubscribe action only takes one click, so the user doesn't have to do any extra work.

The biggest spamming culprits are those companies that offer e-mail, like Google, Yahoo and Hotmail, so to call them the top senders is kind of unfair. After that, the two biggest senders of subscription email that you'll recognize are Facebook and Linkedin. Microsoft is right up there too. The clear leader though, is Google. They send 878.1 million subscription e-mails per day. The top four are Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and Facebook.

At least now with Swizzle, you can pick the brands you want to invite into your inbox and the daily deals stick to one single digest email. All of the brands offered in Swizzle Gallery appeal to a variety of tastes and both genders. However, since women do more shopping statistically, the brands tend to skew toward the fairer sex:

"It's based on the top 1200 sender brands by volume and frequency, so there's a lot of women's stuff, like Macy's, Living Social, Groupon and J. Crew. It's all the retail commerce stuff and online commerce stuff from brands that are trying to stay in touch with their consumers on a regular basis. We do have some guy stuff in there too, like Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowe's."

Plus, as more people use Swizzle to unsubscribe from their email lists using Swizzle, the program will use that information to offer local brands that can be subscribed to -- brands that only exist for that indvidual, are restricted to their local area and can't be subscribed to by the general public. Bekkedahl knows it will make Swizzle users even happier than they already are:

"We invite our users to fill out a form and tell us what they think and they do. Those paragraphs they send us, even those short little notes, come with such regularity it makes us happy. It makes us happy to know that so many users, not only have a good experience, but write to us about it and tweet to their friends or tell their mothers. There's just this big smiley face at the end of every Swizzle transaction and that's something we're really proud of."