Full disclosure up front: we make Sieve, so judge accordingly. Everything below about Clean Email sticks to its own public positioning.
What is Clean Email?
Clean Email calls itself an inbox cleaner for any provider: rules, filters, unsubscribe features, and automation for organizing your mailbox, blocking senders, and clearing years of accumulated mail in grouped actions rather than one message at a time.
Its pages also describe what happens after the purge: Auto Clean rules that continuously process incoming mail once you've set them up, and a Screener that quarantines mail from first-time senders until you approve or block them. The App Store trial description adds specifics: the first 1,000 emails cleaned free, 25 unsubscribes, and Screener and Auto Clean rules running for 14 days.
Its plans page sells the same feature set at every tier: the plans differ only in whether you connect 1, 5, or 10 email accounts.
What Clean Email does well
- Bulk cleanup is a different job from filtering. If you have 40,000 unread messages, no arrival-time filter will help with the pile; grouped bulk actions will.
- Per its own pages, the toolbox extends beyond cleanup: Auto Clean rules that keep working on incoming mail, a Screener for first-time senders, unsubscribe, and sender blocking alongside the bulk actions.
- The trial is concrete: per its App Store listing, your first 1,000 emails are cleaned free, with 25 unsubscribes included; you can evaluate it on your real backlog before paying.
- It positions itself as working across most email providers, not just Gmail, with 5- and 10-account plans you can share.
Clean Email pricing
As of July 2026, Clean Email's own App Store listing prices one account at $9.99 a month or $29.99 a year, five accounts at $19.99 a month, and ten accounts at $29.99 a month or $99.99 a year; every tier gets the full feature set, so the only sizing question is how many accounts you connect. The trial cleans your first 1,000 emails free, per the same listing, and exact regional prices are shown on clean.email. Sieve, for comparison, is $10 a month for Basic or $20 for Pro, which adds a second inbox; both are 15% off yearly with a 7-day free trial.
Where Sieve fits differently
Sieve ships with its judgment built in and learns yours as you go. Every incoming message is classified server-side within seconds. Cold outreach goes under a Solicitor label, phishing under Malicious, and both are archived out of your inbox rather than deleted. When it gets one wrong, drag the message back; the correction is recorded automatically and future classifications improve. Reply to someone and Sieve treats them as a trusted sender from then on. And you can steer it in plain English: "I'm not interested in recruiter pitches."
The difference is where the judgment comes from. Clean Email's automation, as its own pages describe it, is built from your decisions: you define the Auto Clean rules, and the Screener holds each new sender until you rule on them. Sieve arrives with its judgment already formed, so there are no rules to write and no queue of senders awaiting a verdict; what's left for you is the occasional correction. It works through Gmail or Outlook provider-native filing, and phishing links are checked against Google Web Risk.
Mail from people you already know (your domain, trusted senders, anyone in a thread with you) is cleared by deterministic rules before any AI runs, so its contents are never read by the model. Sieve stores no message bodies (mostly metadata, plus the subject line of flagged mail, encrypted and deleted after 30 days), and nothing is used to train models. Google's security review is complete, and SOC 2 Type II is in progress. Read the Privacy Policy.
Sieve and Clean Email, side by side
Statements about Clean Email reflect its own public positioning as of July 2026. Check clean.email for current features and pricing.
When Clean Email is the better choice
Pick Clean Email over Sieve if:
- You're not on Gmail or Outlook. Sieve supports those two providers through their direct APIs. It does not support Yahoo or custom IMAP.
- You want hands-on tools to bulk-clean years of old mail. Sieve never touches mail that arrived before you connected it: it keeps new junk from landing.
- You want to rule on every new sender yourself. Clean Email's Screener model keeps you in the approval loop; Sieve decides on its own and learns from your corrections.
- You're covering many mailboxes cheaply: its 10-account plan is $99.99 a year, per its App Store listing, where Sieve covers at most two inboxes (the second comes with the $20 Pro plan).