How to Subscribe to All the Substacks You Love Without Losing Your Mind
Go ahead, be a slut.
The other day, a friend of mine said she was on a hiatus from subscribing to Substack publications, and my heart broke. What is the point of such a glorious platform of stellar (and even more exciting, little-known) writers if we’re all going to reach a saturation point and refuse to follow and support them? Does that mean there’s a finite number of audience members I can ever hope to have? The whole idea was bleak and depressing.
At the same time, my brain is in a constant state of overwhelm. I don’t want more emails in my inbox—ever. And certainly not weekly newsletters from 300 new Substack friends. My first month on Substack, glancing at my inbox gave me heart palpitations. I put the kibosh on that shit fast, and since that time, I’ve heard a lot of people lamenting that there isn’t a better system.
Until Substack starts responding to my list of perfectly reasonable demands, I’ve come up with a workaround. It takes a smidgen of effort to set up, and it’s held together with paper clips and chewing gum, but it’s saved my sanity and allowed me to still be my little slutty self when it comes to spreading around my Substack love. Maybe it can help you, too, subscribe with reckless abandonment and still have brain cells to spare for other aspects of adulting.
Phase 1: Push Only
If you only do one thing from this article, make it this thing.
The best way to prevent an inbox clogged with 75,000 new posts every day? Turn emails off. It’s easy. Ish.
Navigate to your Settings menu: Click your profile image » Settings » Notifications. The process for getting there is the same whether you’re on desktop or mobile. Once you get there, though, the options are different because Substack likes to keep things interesting.
On mobile, your choices are “prefer push,” “prefer email” or “both push and email.” “Both push and email” would cause me to spontaneously combust, so I chose “prefer push.”
While you’re there, you can also toggle on and off the various types of notifications you’re subjected to. I have “replies,” “mentions” and “restacks” turned on. I don’t need to know when someone “likes” something because “liking” something doesn’t require a response. Capisce?
If you’re tackling this task on desktop, your three options have different names, and it’s a fun game to guess which corresponds to which. Match the pairs1:
⛔️ WARNING ⛔️ This next part might make your brain melt.
I don’t know why we have two different settings menus for Substack or what happens if you check completely different things in each. Feel free to FAFO and report back.
Substack’s explanation for smart notifications is “get notified in app or email, not both.” So . . . which is it, then?
By process of elimination, I deduced that the above statement means you’ll mostly get notified via push. But the Help Center also says: With smart notifications, you'll primarily receive push notifications about new posts in the app and may receive email notifications about posts you've missed if you haven't opened the Substack app in a while. So depending on its mood, you still might get an email.
Also, if push delivery fails, you still might get an email.
All of these unnecessarily complicated questions and considerations aside, you should now stop seeing eleventy billion in the little red circle for your inbox. Your sanity will thank you.
But wait, there’s more . . .
Phase 2: Inbox Filters and Things You Didn’t Consent To
You’re now going to get a lot fewer emails from Substack in your inbox, but not none.
Remember all those options you toggled to “on” in your settings? You’re still going to get emails about those things. I like to think of them as tiny hits of joy (unless they’re comments from 💩 fairies), but I still don’t want to feel inundated. So, I applied a filter in my Gmail account that sends almost2 all of them to a folder labeled “Substack.”
I don’t want to get deeply into the weeds with this, but here’s a video about how to set this up for Gmail users. If you use a different email service provider, search for “how to set up email filters” to get ‘er done.
Once that’s taken care of, there are still a few occasions when you might get an email from a creator.
When that creator is running a promo or announcing a special event.
Did you know there is a way to send emails to your readers that don’t live in perpetuity as posts on your publication’s homepage? You’ve likely seen these, especially when everyone was running subscription deals around the holidays, but you may not have given any thought to how those are created and where they live after they’re sent.
My co-conspirators and I will be teaching how to do this in our Substack Investigative Series launching this month. Find details here.
Those don’t appear to be something you can opt out of, sorry. But the good news is, they’re few and far between.
When a creator has an automation set up to add you to their email/newsletter service provider—like Kit, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.
When I first signed up for Substack, I was so confused about how I received welcome sequences from a few creators when I knew that wasn’t a feature of Substack. It turns out those creators directly imported my email address into a separate platform, which triggered an automated welcome sequence. I thought it was genius and made it my mission to figure out how it was done.3
It wasn’t until later that I realized that if you want to unsubscribe from that creator, you have to do it not once but twice. Once to remove yourself from the Substack app and again to remove yourself from their newsletter list. I think unsubscribing should be frictionless—and this isn’t—so I have taken this task off my to-do list for 2025.
If your goal is to be super militant about your inbox (and more power to you), you may want to unsubscribe from the email service providers only of these creators. So you’ll still get what they post on Substack in the app, but you won’t get the promos and announcements that they send to their newsletter list. A lot of them write entirely different content for each platform, so you’ll have to weigh the pros of less email against the cons of missing something important.
How can you tell whether you’re looking at a post from Substack versus one from an email service provider like Kit? Substack emails are branded as such.
The first tip-off is that the “sender” is a publication name: Unfiltered by Tim Denning. Messages sent from his Kit account just use his name.
The “sender email” is a Substack address.
There’s that trusty Substack branding we know and love.
When you click “read in app,” it takes you to Substack.
Kit/Mailchimp/Constant Contact emails, on the other hand, usually have the option to “read online” which takes you to that platform’s archive. The best way I’ve found to tell where an email has come from is to hover over the “unsubscribe” button4 (not that you can see it, but it’s #1 below) and look at the URL that pops up in the yellow bar on the bottom of your screen (#2). Here we see it says unsubcribe.convertkit which was Kit’s former name.
It’s safe to unsubscribe from these emails. I’m sure the creators who use this method will not be keen on me telling you this. But if the danger of your brain exploding from email overwhelm is real, and this will keep you from unsubscribing from everything altogether, I figure everybody wins.
Phase 3: Go Nuclear
I’m learning to accept my limitations. I like to believe I don’t have any, which leads to believing I can do it all, which leads to the constant overwhelm I spoke of in the intro. One way I’ve found to remedy this is to start aggressively saying no to most things so that I can say yes to the right ones. And this applies to my Substack inbox.
I don’t want to not subscribe to you because I’m subbed to too many others. But I am gonna have to ruthlessly cull my inbox, and only certain people are getting through the filters. It’s up to you to make your own rules, but here’s what works for me.
Some people I will read no matter what. They could pen a piece and call it “Turd,” and I would save that puppy for later. This list, however, is small.
I also rarely listen to a podcast or watch a video from the app. I’m a firm believer that you’re in a certain type of mood when you go to a specific platform, and you’re unlikely to take an action that differs from that mood.
It’s why Instagram has rotten conversion rates for podcasters. Someone looking for a quit hit of IG dopamine isn’t feeling a 45-minute podcast conversation. Your experience might be different, though. This is how I weed through my inbox.
Beyond these two factors, it’s your headline and subtitle, baby. 5,000 people are waving at me, and I’m swiping left like mad to stay sane . . . unless someone says something memorable. That’s why headlines like “The Weekender” don’t do anything for me unless you’ve graduated to the “read no matter what” list.
When I finally write a post about headlines that doesn’t just regurgitate the same advice you’ve heard 1,000 times, I’ll link to it here. But in the meantime, here are some tips:
Use a headline analyzer, and don’t stop trying until you’re in the green zone.
Copy/paste your post into ChatGPT and ask it to come up with 10 possible titles and subtitles. You can converse with it and tell it to try again using more emotion or power words or a different tone of voice until you get something usable. I always walk away with a handful of words I hadn’t thought of, and then I rework them into something completely original.
Keep a file of headlines that really jump out at you. Over time, you will start to see patterns—are you attracted to humor, titles that mention results, numbered lists, double entendre? Not only does this give you insight on what makes people click (you, after all, are people), but it’s a great resource for inspiration when you’re feeling stuck.
Not gonna lie, it’s a rare title that gets me to click on a “Preview” for a paid subscribers-only post. I have to pray the teaser I get to read before I hit the paywall will be worth the inevitable frustration I feel from being locked out. I have a special aversion to being locked out of things. It makes me hate you, which I recognize is a “me” problem. But it’s why I put my bonus resources and discounts in a paywalled vault and make all5 of my posts free forever. It’s because I don’t want people doing what I do, which is sending “Preview” posts straight to the trash.
So, now that you know it’s possible to engage in free Substack love and keep your sanity, are you inspired to be gratuitous in hitting that subscribe button?
What tips do you use to streamline distractions? I’d love to hear in the comments!
🕵🏻♀️ If you’re feeling meta and want to read more insights and tricks for Substack, check out these special posts for paid subscribers:
Want in? For only $6/month you get instant access to these and more of my best insights. I’ll also review your bio and publication tagline and give you personalized advice. Aaand, you’ll be first to know when the Substack Investigative Series comes to town.
Update as of 2/24/25: Substack figured out their way of doing things was dumb and changed the three options to almost match within mobile and desktop. Almost. Not sure why they couldn’t just copy/paste, but . . .
Like Substack, this is an imperfect system, and despite my best efforts, some messages still hit my inbox, but it’s much, much better than it was before.
Yet another thing we’re teaching in Substack Investigative, but you also have to listen to our strong opinions about the ethics of doing this. Sorry, not sorry.
Hover, NOT click. I repeat, do NOT click.
but a very select few
This was super helpful, Jennie!
I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with all the emails and I followed just what you did and changed the setting to "Push."
Thank you!
Coincidentally, I also have a post about this coming out on Saturday. I'm def going to link to yours in mine because it needs to be heard 😁