When your inbox is overflowing with unsolicited messages, email cleaning services like Clean Email, Mailstrom, Cleanfox, or Unroll.me can seem like an easy fix for decluttering your inbox and reducing spam. After all, spam accounted(new window) for almost half of all email traffic as of December 2023, so it’s not just an occasional nuisance.
But granting any third-party access to your inbox comes with security and privacy risks. Here’s what you need to know before handing over your emails and how Proton Mail offers a safer, more private alternative.
How email cleaning services work
Most inbox cleaners require your email account password and OAuth(new window) (a secure authorization protocol) to fully access your inbox — this gives them permission to read, modify, and manage your emails.
Once connected, they scan through all your emails to understand what types of messages you receive, who sends them, and how you typically handle them, like what you read or delete.
They then automatically unsubscribe you from unwanted newsletters, remove old or duplicate emails, and sort what’s left into categories. Many keep working in the background to manage new emails and track your email habits.
However, tests(new window) have shown that some services don’t actually unsubscribe you from anything. Instead, they simply move unwanted emails into custom folders or trash bins, keeping them out of sight but still taking up cloud storage space.
What are the privacy risks of Clean Email?
Here’s why email cleaning tools aren’t the safest or most private for managing your inbox:
Full access means full exposure
Many email cleaning services claim to look only at email headers, such as subject lines and sender information, without accessing the actual contents. There’s no way to verify this since, technically, they have complete access. This means they could potentially see:
- Financial statements with your income, expenses, and banking details
- Medical records with sensitive health information
- Business contracts and confidential negotiations
- Private conversations with family, friends, or colleagues
- Account recovery details, including password reset emails that could be exploited for hacking
Rather than trusting a service to voluntarily limit what it looks at, it’s safer to use Proton Mail for managing your inbox. We use end-to-end encryption to protect all your data, making us technically unable to access your email contents in the first place.
Your data can be sold or used for marketing
If something is free, you’re probably the product. It also applies to free email cleaning services that usually make money by selling your inbox data to advertisers, market researchers, and other third parties.
Unroll.me faced(new window) backlash in 2017 when it was revealed that Slice Technologies (the owner at that time) sold aggregated user data to companies like Uber, despite previously claiming it did not use email contents in any way.
Even if an email cleaner doesn’t sell your personal details, it may still profit from analyzing your inbox contents. For example, Cleanfox and Unroll.me are currently owned by Nielsen IQ, a consumer intelligence company that studies consumer habits and targets marketing strategies.
Proton Mail is exclusively supported by our paying customers, including the free version. We never sell or monetize your data — ever — as outlined in our privacy policy.
Encryption alone won’t fully protect your emails
Encryption is often advertised as a way to protect your data, but encryption alone doesn’t eliminate the risks associated with granting full inbox access. Even if your emails are encrypted at rest (e.g., AES-256), the service must decrypt them to process and analyze your inbox — it can read your message contents at some point. Without end-to-end encryption (E2EE), emails are often encrypted only in storage or during transmission, but not while they are being accessed or processed. If an attacker gains access before encryption is applied or after decryption, your sensitive data can still be exposed in a data breach, leading to risks such as identity theft or phishing attacks.
Unlike services that decrypt your data for processing, Proton Mail encrypts emails on your device before they ever reach our servers, so your data remains private and inaccessible to us or anyone else. In the unlikely event that our infrastructure is compromised, there would be nothing to steal.
Canceling your account doesn’t delete your data
If you stop using an email cleaning service and cancel your subscription, it may still retain access to your inbox. For example, Clean Email deletes(new window) indexed email data 45 days after cancellation but keeps your account information unless you manually request its deletion. Even if you delete your account, Unroll.Me keeps(new window) your past email data for up to 7 years to fuel its research business.
When you delete your Proton Account, we permanently remove all associated data, and your account can’t be recovered. Plus, we don’t recycle usernames, so yours won’t be available again.
If a service shuts down, what happens to your data?
Some companies fail to properly delete user data when they close. Others are acquired by larger firms with different privacy policies — such as Unroll.me, which was involved in the Uber data misuse after being acquired by Slice in 2014. If an email cleaner doesn’t explicitly state what happens to your data after shutdown, assume it could be sold or repurposed.
For example, Mailstrom allows(new window) user data to be transferred if the company is sold, with no clear promise of deletion. This means your information could end up with a new owner and used in ways you didn’t agree to.
Proton was built for privacy, not profit. We never considered or planned an exit strategy, which is why Proton Mail and all other services are safeguarded by a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation. This structure keeps us independent and committed to our mission, with legal protections in place.
Safely manage your emails with Proton Mail
Instead of exposing your messages to email cleaning services, you can use Proton Mail’s built-in features to manage your inbox while maintaining your privacy and security:
- Advanced spam filtering sorts your incoming emails by default, and you can set Proton Mail to auto-delete unwanted messages. You can control what reaches your inbox using custom allow and block lists, and label or archive emails based on custom filters.
- Hide-my-email aliases are more private since they hide your primary email address when signing up for online services. They forward messages to your inbox without exposing your real address, and you can delete them anytime to stop unwanted emails.
- One-click unsubscribe removes you from mailing lists without having to visit external websites or grant additional permissions.
- Enhanced tracking protection prevents email senders from monitoring your email activity and collecting data about when and how you interact with messages.
Proton is committed to protecting your privacy under strict Swiss data protection laws — we never show ads or abuse your data. All Proton apps are independently audited and open source, so anyone can check our claims.
Moving your existing emails to Proton Mail is simple with the Easy Switch feature, which transfers everything from your current email provider.
