Clean Email and Cleanfox Comparison
In this showdown of bulk email unsubscribers, we compare CLeanfox with Clean Email to help you choose the right tool for cleaning up your messy inbox. Even though CLeanfox and Clean Email may seem similar from a distance, the differences between them are actually quite pronounced, and you need to be aware of them to make the right choice.
Clean Email |
Cleanfox |
Price | Free trial | Unsubscribe Feature | Auto Clean Rules | Quick Clean(easy-to-select actions) | Smart Views (grouping relevant emails) | Block Senders | Daily Digest | Privacy | Email providers supported | Platforms | Multiple accounts support | Available in the EU & EEA | Sharing data with third parties |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
$9.99/mo $29.99/year | removing up to 1000 emails | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | Read Later | We do not access the content of emails or attachments. | Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, AOL, and any IMAP email service | Web, macOS, iOS, Android | yes | yes | no |
free | - | yes | no | no | no | no | no | We use anonymous data from your transactional emails. | Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Orange, SFR, Free, La Poste, GMX, iCloud | Web, iOS, Android | yes | yes | yes |
What Is Cleanfox App?
Founded by Edouard Nattée, a co-creator of Westwing.fr, the Cleanfox app is an easy-to-use email unsubscriber that’s keenly aware of the negative impact spam email messages have on the environment. According to Cleanfox, one email generates 10 grams of CO₂ per year, which is truly alarming considering that 80% of emails are never opened.
To reduce the negative impact spam email messages have on the environment, Nattée decided to create an email tool that would allow its users to get rid of spam and newsletters cluttering their inboxes in just a few clicks.

Today, Cleanfox is trusted by many users around the world, and it has apps for both Android and iOS. However, Cleanfox is not the only email unsubscribing solution out there, and we would argue that it’s not nearly as good as the most popular alternative to Cleanfox today: Clean Email.
What Is Clean Email?
It wouldn’t be fair to describe Clean Email as an email unsubscriber only because there’s so much more this email management tool can do besides unsubscribing you from unwanted emails. Using its sophisticated algorithms, Clean Email analyzes email headers that contain subject line, sender and recipient information, dates, email size, and similar metadata to organize all your emails into easy to review bundles, which you can then manage with a few simple clicks.
Whenever you act on a group of emails, Clean Email gives you the option to apply the same action automatically in the future, allowing you to completely automate your email management and ensure that unwanted emails will never pile up in your inbox ever again.


Just like Cleanfox, Clean Email has apps for Android and iOS, but you can also use it on the web without installing any app. Clean Email is an A+ rated BBB Accredited business, which means that it upholds the values ethics, integrity, and respect.
Features
Let’s start with what Cleanfox and Clean Email have in common. Both apps work with all major email providers, including Gmail, Hotmail, Live, Outlook, Yahoo, and others, and are able to automatically detect newsletters and other subscription emails in your inbox. They then present the detected emails for review, making it easy for you to get rid of the emails you don’t want to keep in your inbox.
The biggest difference is that Cleanfox puts an interesting spin on email management by telling you how many grams of CO₂ per year you’ve helped save by getting rid of unwanted email subscriptions. By gamifying email management this way, Cleanfox gives its users another reason to use it and instantly rewards them for their effort to keep their inboxes clean.
However, we’re not sure where Cleanfox gets its numbers from because Mike Berners-Lee, the author of the 2010 book “How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything,” estimated that an ordinary email that you click on, open, forward, or reply to emits 4 grams of CO2. That said, it’s 100% true that the global CO2 footprint of email is astonishing in size, equivalent to the amount of greenhouse gases produced by almost 5 million cars.
Clean Email doesn’t gamify inbox management in any way, and that’s because it doesn’t need to. All it takes is a couple of clicks to clean up all unwanted emails using Clean Email. First, Clean Email will segment your mailbox using rules and filters, creating neat groups of relevant emails, including junk emails and spam, bounced email notifications, subscriptions and newsletters, large emails, social network notifications, online shopping emails, and others. You can then easily remove, move, add labels, and perform other actions on entire groups of emails and tell Clean Email to apply the same actions automatically in the future.


Whereas Cleanfox can be used to unsubscribe from newsletters only, Clean Email can help you get rid of even emails that don’t include an unsubscribe link. Clean Email’s Unsubscriber feature is so smart that even dummy unsubscribe links can’t deceive it. That’s because Clean Email doesn’t even bother with unsubscribe links—it simply moves email messages to trash.


This has several important benefits:
- When you unsubscribe from a sender with Clean Email, you stop receiving emails from the sender immediately because there’s no grace period during which marketers and spammers can employ all sorts of tactics to convince you to keep your subscription.
- Because Clean Email doesn’t touch unsubscribe links, it doesn’t need to see the content of your email. All it needs are unimportant email metadata, such as the sender’s name and email address, the recipient’s name and email address, and the time and date of when the email was sent.
- You can still change your mind in the future and easily re-subscribe and start getting emails from the sender again just by telling Clean Email to stop moving emails from the sender to the trash folder. Without Clean Email, re-subscribing to a newsletter can be very difficult because you have to first find an old newsletter email, which may be impossible if you keep your inbox clean.
As you can see, Clean Email is a far more feature-packed email management solution, which is exactly what makes it the best Cleanfox alternative out there. It can even protect the emails you need so you don’t accidentally delete them when managing your inbox, and it handles multiple email accounts or aliases with ease.
Privacy Policy and Pricing
Free apps are great, but you should be suspicious every time you see an app that has been developed by professionals being offered for free because it’s probably making money in some hidden way—which you would likely not approve if you knew about it. That’s, unfortunately, the case with Cleanfox, which collects data from its users and sells it to undisclosed third parties.
“We may collect, use, transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose,” states Cleanfox in its privacy policy. “For example, when you use our services, we may collect data from and about the commercial electronic mail messages and transactional or relationship messages that are sent to your email accounts so that we can, for instance, better understand the behavior of the senders of such messages, and better understand our customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising, and we may disclose, distribute, transfer, and sell such messages…”
What’s even worse, Cleanfox deliberately scans the e-receipts consumers receive when they purchase something online and extract data from them. That’s against the new Gmail API policy, which comes into effect on June 26th, 2019.
Being a commercial software application with a very clear pricing structure, Clean Email has no reason to collect and sell the personal data of its customers—and it doesn’t do so. Instead, it offers three premium packages that include all features and unlimited access to customer support. The most affordable package, which includes one account, costs just $2.49 a month with annual billing, making it irresistibly affordable considering how capable Clean Email is.
Clean Email: The Best Cleanfox Alternative for Busy Professionals
When it comes to email management, would you rather play games or get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible so you can get back to work and be productive?
If you’ve picked the first option, you may enjoy Cleanfox and its fun gamification elements, which motivate you to get rid of newsletters, spam, and advertising emails by telling you how much CO2 you saved per year.
However, if you’re looking for a comprehensive inbox cleaner that can do more than unsubscribe you from unwanted subscriptions, Clean Email is the way to go, giving you all the tools you need to tame your inbox and keep it clean. With just a few clicks, you can reduce your email carbon footprint a lot more than you ever could by relying solely on Cleanfox.
This is what you need to do to start using Clean Email as an alternative to Cleanfox:
- Visit Clean Email’s homepage.
- Click "Get Started for Free" and sign in with your email address.
- Use the Quick Clean option to organize all common types of emails, such as older emails, social notifications, emails from dead ends, unread emails, and more.


Conclusion
The Cleanfox email unsubscriber has many strongpoints, but its privacy policy isn’t among them. Unless you are fine with some software company analyzing your purchases and selling the gathered data to undisclosed third parties, we strongly advise you to go with Clean Email instead. Besides respecting your privacy, Clean Email comes with more features than Cleanfox, such as its impressive ability to automate your email management.