How to Stop Substack Emails (2026)

Stop Substack emails: unsubscribe from one newsletter, turn off Substack's own marketing and digests, or unsubscribe from everything at once.

There are two kinds of Substack email: newsletters from the publications you subscribed to, and Substack's own emails (feature updates, reading suggestions, activity digests, new follower alerts). Substack also creates an account for you automatically the first time you subscribe to any publication, which is why many people get Substack emails they never signed up for directly.

From Substack's help center:

From the email: scroll to the bottom of any newsletter and select Unsubscribe. In the window that opens, choose Unsubscribe from all to stop that publication entirely.
From your account: go to substack.com/settings, click the publication under Subscriptions, then click Unsubscribe in the Notifications section.

Unsubscribing from a free newsletter doesn't cancel a paid one. If you pay for a publication, cancel it separately first.

Stop Substack's own emails

Click your profile icon and select Settings (substack.com/settings).
In the Marketing section, uncheck Email next to Marketing (feature news) and Reading suggestions.
Uncheck Email next to Activity Digests to stop emails about replies, mentions, and notes you missed.
If you get "new follower" emails, go to the Connections section and uncheck Email next to New followers.

Unsubscribe from everything on Substack

To leave every publication and stop all Substack emails, use the Danger Zone section of your Settings page. Substack warns this completely unsubscribes you: you won't get newsletters, see posts in the app, or see those publications in your Subscriptions.

If you like a newsletter but not the email, the Substack app can deliver posts there instead of to your inbox.

Block or filter Substack emails in Gmail or Outlook

If some Substack emails still get through, filter them in your email app so they skip your inbox:

Gmail: open a Substack email, click the three dots (More) at the top, and choose Filter messages like these. Click Create filter, then pick Skip the Inbox (Archive it) or Delete it.
Outlook: right-click a Substack email and choose Rules → Create rule to move messages from that sender to a folder. Or choose Block sender if you never want to see them. Blocking sends future messages to Junk.

A filter is better than blocking if some of the emails (receipts, security alerts) are ones you may need later.

Substack is rarely the only sender filling your inbox. Inbox Zero's Bulk Unsubscribe finds every newsletter and marketing sender in your Gmail or Outlook account and lets you deal with them together:

See every sender in one list. Newsletters and marketing emails are grouped by sender, with how many each one sends and how often you actually open them.
Unsubscribe in one click. Inbox Zero uses each sender's own unsubscribe mechanism, and you can select several senders at once. Select suggested picks out high-volume senders you rarely read.
Auto Archive what won't stop. For senders that keep emailing (like newsletters you subscribed to once and never read), Auto Archive files future emails out of your inbox automatically, optionally with a label, so they're there if you need them.
Clean up the backlog. Archive or delete old emails from a sender in bulk instead of scrolling through them.

For account notifications like Substack's, the settings above are still the most complete fix, because they stop the emails at the source. Inbox Zero covers everything else, and it's open source.