Clean Email Review: My Independent View (2026)

If your inbox is overflowing and you don’t have the time or patience to clean and organize it, chances are you’ve Googled something like ‘best email cleaning apps’. Clean Email shows up on almost every one of those lists.

I was curious whether it actually deserves all that praise, so I decided to test it myself. After testing 50+ productivity and inbox management tools over the years, I wanted to see how Clean Email holds up as an email management solution for a cluttered inbox.

In this Clean Email review, I’ll walk you through how it performed in real use, covering its key features, pricing, pros and cons, and everything else you might want to know before deciding if it’s worth it.

Let’s dive in!

What is Clean Email?

Clean Email is an email management tool founded in Ukraine in 2014. The company emphasizes user privacy as a core value, choosing a paid subscription model from day one so it doesn’t have to sell or share personal data. Over 1.5 million users have utilized Clean Email to clean hundreds of billions of unwanted emails.

Clean Email is also Google-verified and certified secure, which adds an extra layer of trust when connecting your email account and handling personal data. It focuses on safe, user-controlled actions, meaning deleting emails won’t happen without your approval.

It is especially useful if you receive a high volume of email messages and want a clear, structured way to stay organized without relying on AI-driven features.

While users consistently praise Clean Email for its ability to efficiently manage and organize inboxes, we wanted to see if it is justified or not.

Key features

Now let’s take a closer look at the key features I tried during my Clean email review!

Cleaning Suggestions

Clean Email can process over 100,000 emails at the same time, which makes it suitable even for extremely cluttered inboxes. That said, the initial syncing process can take longer if your inbox is heavily overloaded.

Cleaning Suggestions is the feature I used the most while testing Clean Email. It scans your inbox by looking at patterns like senders, email frequency, and how you usually interact with messages. Then it groups similar emails together and suggests what you might want to clean up. So don’t worry, as nothing happens automatically, you’re only shown suggestions.

This is also why it feels safe to use. Emails are never deleted on their own, and during my testing, Cleaning Suggestions didn’t suggest deleting a single important message. You always have to confirm what happens next, so you can trust this feature completely.

Furthermore, each suggestion comes with several action options, not just delete. You can archive emails, move them to another folder, mark them as read, or ignore the suggestion completely. I really liked the layout here. It’s compact and easy to scan, but still detailed enough to clearly show what’s included.

If you’re sure that certain emails should always be handled the same way, you can turn a suggestion into a rule directly from this view, as you can see in the screenshot. In practice, this means Cleaning Suggestions become more personalized the longer you use the app.

Unsubscriber

For many users, managing subscriptions is frustrating because unsubscribe links are often hard to find, poorly visible, or lead through multiple steps. Some services also fail to fully remove users from all mailing lists, leaving unwanted emails behind in hidden folders or subcategories. This is where Unsubscriber shines.

It builds nicely on the logic behind Cleaning Suggestions, but focuses specifically on subscription emails and mailing lists. This feature lets you see all active subscriptions and decide how you want to handle them. In other words, it’s not just an unsubscribe button, but more of a control center.

Just like with Cleaning Suggestions, nothing happens automatically here either. You can choose to fully unsubscribe, pause emails for a while, or keep receiving them. The overall view is compact and very easy to navigate, even when you’re dealing with a longer list of subscriptions. The option to bulk select and bulk delete makes the process even faster.

Beyond unsubscribing, you also get several options for managing future emails from the same sender. You can move them to another folder, send them to Read Later, or adjust more advanced preferences through Sender Settings, where you can also create rules, similar to what you can do from Cleaning Suggestions.

While many email cleanup apps offer some form of unsubscribe feature, not all of them make the process this clear. However, keep in mind that this feature is available only on paid plans.

Smart Folders

Beyond standard folders and labels that usually require manual sorting, Smart Folders organize your inbox automatically. This feature groups almost all your emails into different categories (except for pinned, unwanted, or spam emails).

Unlike some email apps, like Spark, where you can create your own smart folders but don’t get any ready-made ones, Clean Email takes a different approach. You can’t create custom Smart Folders, but the existing selection is so long that I personally didn’t miss that option or feel limited in any way.

It’s also worth noting that not all Smart Folders will appear for every email address. Which ones you see depends on the type of emails you receive, but in practice, this helps keep the interface relevant.

Screener

In addition to Unsubscribe, Clean Email offers another advanced email organizer feature – Screener. This one is off by default, but if you enable it, it will stop emails from first-time senders before they reach your inbox. This means that Screener will hold new messages from unknown senders for your review. In practice, it works like an inbox gatekeeper.

So, when you get, for example, a random first-time email, a cold pitch, or an accidental subscription message, you can choose to allow their incoming messages into your inbox, block them permanently, or some other delivery option. You can also choose how often you want to be notified when new, and potentially unwelcome, senders are waiting for approval.

Furthermore, you can even pre-approve specific email addresses, domains, or keywords so they never get screened at all.

Auto Clean rules

Up to this point, Cleaning Suggestions, Unsubscriber, and Screener already do a good job of keeping your inbox under control. However, if you want to take things a step further and automate those decisions, you can do it with this feature. It lets you create rules that automatically apply actions to emails based on almost any criteria you choose.

Rules are fully customizable and easy to understand. You choose which messages the rule applies to, based on things like sender, domain, message age, or keywords, and then decide what should happen. For example, you can automatically move low-priority newsletters to Read Later or send no-reply system notifications to a separate folder.

You can choose whether a rule applies only to future emails or to existing ones as well, and every rule can be edited, paused, or disabled at any time. There’s also a clear history view, so you can always see when a rule ran and how many messages it affected.

Lastly, the same as the Screener, you can choose how often you want to get notified about this feature’s activity, and keep things transparent.

Privacy Monitor

Last but not least, this Privacy Monitor deals with your email security and privacy. It works automatically and regularly checks whether your email address appears in known data breaches and security incidents.

During my testing, my email wasn’t found in any breaches, so no action was needed.

Integrations

In addition to the web version, Clean Email offers dedicated apps for iOS and Android, alongside its macOS app. There’s no dedicated Windows desktop app, which I didn’t love, so I tested the web version. It worked smoothly, and I didn’t have any issues.

In terms of email providers, Clean Email integrates directly with all major services. You can connect Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, and any IMAP-based email account, which should cover most personal and work inboxes.

User interface

Clean Email has a clean, user-friendly interface. It’s easy to navigate, not distracting, and the learning curve is almost non-existent. I still don’t love that there’s no dedicated Windows desktop app, but the web version was stable in my experience.

What stood out to me are Home and Control Center views in the left sidebar that give you a clear overview of everything that’s happening in your inbox. You also get both light and dark mode, which is a small detail, but a nice one if you spend a lot of time in the app.

Pricing

Clean Email offers a free plan and a generous 14-day free trial. The free version lets you clean up to 1,000 emails and unsubscribe from up to 25 newsletters. However, it doesn’t include premium features like Unsubscribe, Screener, Sender and Mailing List Settings, and Auto Clean.

Unlike free services like Unroll.me or Cleanfox, which monetize user data, Clean Email operates on a paid subscription model and does not sell user information.Premium plans are based on the number of email accounts you want to manage.

Pricing starts at €11.99 per month with monthly billing for one account. If you want 5 accounts, the price is €23.99 monthly, while 10 accounts will cost you €35.99. You can see the prices for annual billing in the screenshot.

Overall, Clean Email is not the cheapest, but its pricing is reasonable for what you get.

Pros and cons I discovered during my Clean Email review

Here, I summarize the pros and cons I found throughout my Clean Email review.

Pros of Clean Email:

Cons of Clean Email:

My experience with Clean Email

I used this app regularly for several weeks, and I didn’t run into any issues during testing. The experience was smooth and predictable from the start, and I really liked the balance between automation and manual control. I could complete most of the actions in just a few clicks.

I’d recommend Clean Email to anyone who wants a reliable, long-term way to keep their inbox organized, especially if they deal with a lot of newsletters and recurring emails. If you’re looking for AI-powered features or smart replies, this probably isn’t the right tool, but for practical inbox cleanup, it works really well.

Clean Email alternatives

If you’re still unsure whether this is the right email management app for you, we’ve got you! Here are some solid Clean Email alternatives worth considering:

• AgainstData: A privacy-focused email cleanup tool with a very simple interface.
• Leave Me Alone: An email management service focused on sorting incoming emails and senders into different categories.
• Unroll.me: One of the more popular free apps for unsubscribing from marketing emails. However, it monetizes user data, which may raise security concerns.
• Cleanfox: A free tool designed to help users remove unwanted marketing emails and unsubscribe from newsletters. Like Unroll.me, it relies on data monetization rather than a paid subscription model.
• Spark: A popular email client with built-in AI features, smart inbox organization, and collaboration tools. Unlike Clean Email, Spark focuses more on AI assistance and email productivity than long-term inbox cleanup.
• Superhuman Mail: A premium email client known for speed, keyboard-first workflow, and AI features.
• Canary Mail: A secure email client with a strong focus on privacy, encryption, and smart inbox features.
• Missive: A collaborative email client designed for teams, with shared inboxes and task assignment. It’s more of a productivity workspace than a cleanup tool, but useful if you need collaboration plus email management.
• SaneBox: An email organizer that filters unimportant messages into separate folders automatically. It works with any email provider and focuses on a clean inbox, though its feature set and pricing differ from Clean Email.

Wrap up: Clean Email review

We’ve reached the end of this review, and I hope it helped you get a clearer picture of what Clean Email actually offers in real use. After testing it myself, it makes sense why it shows up on so many “best email cleaning tools” lists.

I know it’s not the cheapest option, and it doesn’t come with AI features, but if you care more about knowing exactly what happens to your emails, I’d still recommend it.

Related articles:

• Best 5 Email Productivity Apps To Accomplish More In 2026
• Sanebox Review: The Best Email App For Inbox Management? (2026)
• Missive App Review: This Email App Will SHOCK You (2026)

As always, I will update this Clean Email reviewover time so you guys have up-to-date information about this clean inbox tool.

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Have a question or suggestion? I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out anytime at aronkantor@thebusinessdive.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Clean Email be trusted?

Yes, Clean Email can be trusted. The app follows a user-controlled approach, meaning it never deletes or moves emails automatically without your confirmation. It also operates on a paid subscription model, which helps avoid data sharing or selling user information, and focuses strongly on user privacy.

How much does Clean Email cost?

Clean Email offers a free version and paid plans, with the monthly rate starting at €11.99 for one email account. Pricing depends on how many inboxes you manage, whether it’s a Gmail account, Yahoo Mail, or another IMAP account. Discounted prices are available through an auto-renewing annual subscription.

Is Clean Email really free?

Clean Email has a free version that lets you clean up to 1,000 email messages using basic actions like bulk delete and organizing a cluttered inbox. Advanced features such as Auto Clean rules, Smart Folders, Unsubscriber, and Screener are available only on paid plans, but you can try them during the free trial.

Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself, and all opinions expressed here are our own. This post may contain affiliate links that, at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission. Read the full privacy policy here.