My Favorite Leave Me Alone Alternative: Clean Email

Clean Email and Leave Me Alone Comparison

Author's Note: I've meticulously tested every feature of both the Leave Me Alone email app and Clean Email, and this review is based entirely on my personal findings. All screenshots and information provided are current as of September 2024.

Let's take a quick look at how Clean Email and Leave Me Alone stack up against each other on some key features:

🎯 A quick analysis of the table above should tell you that Clean Email has a slight edge over Leave Me Alone in several key areas, namely UI localization, ease of signup, and availability.

Out of these, my main concern is the ease of signing up. With Clean Email, connecting your mailbox on any device takes just a few seconds.

In contrast, Leave Me Alone requires users to enable two-factor authentication, create an app-specific password, and then copy and paste it into the app. This extra step can be time-consuming and complicates the process.

Additionally, Leave Me Alone is only web-based and lacks mobile accessibility, which limits both its availability and usability. On top of that, Clean Email offers language localization, whereas Leave Me Alone is only available in English, restricting its user base to English speakers.

Besides this, I've found other significant differences in how they handle various commonly performed email management tasks:

I want to unsubscribe from emails

✅ Leave Me Alone: Allows you to unsubscribe from unwanted emails if the sender complies with unsubscribe requests. However, it doesn't delete existing emails from these subscriptions; it simply leaves them in your inbox or moves them to a separate folder (with the label: unsubscribed-mailing-lists).

This means you'll still need to manually clean up old messages to declutter your inbox.

✅ Clean Email: Clean Email will either successfully unsubscribe you or, if that’s not possible, automatically route all future emails from that sender to the Trash folder, and you can do so in bulk. In any case, there's no need to perform any manual clean-up to remove the clutter because Clean Email also provides an option to mass-delete existing emails.

Furthermore, you can view a list of all the mailing lists you've unsubscribed from by selecting the Unsubscribed tab at the top of the Unsubscriber section.

I want to clean up unwanted emails

❌ Leave Me Alone: Because Leave Me Alone focuses exclusively on subscriptions, it can't help you clean up other unwanted messages, such as those that are very old, contain large attachments that are taking a lot of space in your inbox, or have been sent by people you no longer communicate with.

✅ Clean Email: Excels at cleaning up unwanted emails. The inbox organizer automatically groups messages by sender, so it's easy to clean up hundreds or even thousands of unwanted emails in a few clicks. You can also set up Auto Clean rules to automatically process incoming emails based on your preferences, helping you stop spam emails and clean up, for example, Gmail storage.

I want to organize my emails

❌ Leave Me Alone: Leave Me Alone does not organize emails into folders or labels, as it focuses solely on identifying and managing email subscriptions. It doesn't interact with your entire mailbox, so it can’t organize non-subscription emails or provide other inbox management features.

However, when it comes to subscriptions, Leave Me Alone does offer some organization features through its Rollup digest system, which makes it possible to combine multiple messages into a single digest (you can configure the exact time you receive it). If you have multiple accounts, then you can even combine newsletters from all your accounts into Rollups sent to your main account.

✅ Clean Email: While Clean Email doesn’t combine newsletters from multiple accounts into a single digest, it offers a more comprehensive set of organization tools. With Clean Email, you can create Auto Clean rules to automatically send specific newsletters or emails to the Read Later folder or other custom folders.

Taking organization even further, Clean Email’s standout Smart Folders system automatically categorizes your emails into over 30 predefined folders. These include categories like Top senders, Social notifications, Online shopping, Finance and Insurance, Travel, and more.

In addition, Clean Email also offers extensive filtering options, allowing you to sort emails by size, date, sender, read/unread status, starred/unstarred status, and assigned labels. This level of granularity gives you precise control over how you view and manage your emails.

I want to automate routine email tasks

❌ Leave Me Alone: No automation features beyond its core unsubscribe functionality.

✅ Clean Email: This is where Clean Email really shines. Its Auto Clean feature allows you to create rules that automatically process incoming emails. For example, you can automatically archive newsletters after a certain period, delete emails from specific senders, or move certain types of emails to designated folders.

All Auto Clean rules can be managed from a user-friendly dashboard, where you can pause/resume them at any time and more.

I want to reply to messages as I'm organizing them

❌ Leave Me Alone: Unfortunately, the Leave Me Alone email app doesn't offer the ability to reply to messages while you're organizing your inbox. This limitation means you'll need to switch back to your regular email client if you want to respond to messages during your organization process.

✅ Clean Email: Clean Email offers a more comprehensive email management experience, including the ability to reply to messages as you organize your inbox. In practice, this means that you can easily select a message in the preview pane and click the Reply button to respond. Clean Email provides options to format your message, add CC or BCC recipients, and even forward messages (though it's worth noting that forwarding attachments is not currently supported).

What Is Leave Me Alone?

Leave Me Alone app is a legit email management tool designed to help users regain control of their inboxes. As someone who's personally tested the Leave Me Alone app, I can confirm that it is safe and does what it promises.

📌 However, I need to point out that Leave Me Alone focuses exclusively on helping users unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters and promotional emails. While they can, indeed, significantly contribute to inbox clutter (or even be its primary sources), other types of emails, including legitimate personal correspondence, can also be a problem unless managed well—and that's not something Leave Me Alone can do.

Key features:

Here are the most important features Leave Me Alone has to offer:

• Unsubscribe: The core feature of Leave Me Alone is its unsubscribe functionality. It scans your inbox for subscription emails and presents them in a list, allowing you to unsubscribe from these newsletters with just a few clicks.

• Inbox Shield: This feature prevents unwanted emails from reaching your inbox in the first place. It works by intercepting emails from new senders and allowing you to decide whether to allow or block them.
• Block senders (various Blocklists): Leave Me Alone offers several blocklist options to manage your incoming messages, including a list of known spam, phishing, and malware email addresses, a list containing the addresses of major social media platforms, or a list with major senders of cold emails. You can also create a custom blocklist to manually block whoever you want.
• Rollups: With this feature, you can combine multiple subscription emails into a single Rollup digest, which can be delivered on a schedule of your choosing. It's a great way to reduce inbox clutter while still keeping informed about those subscriptions you actually find useful.

Disadvantages of Leave Me Alone

While the Leave Me Alone app is a legitimate tool for managing email subscriptions, it has several major disadvantages that might make users consider a Leave Me Alone alternative (they're the reasons why I started writing this article):

• Limited unsubscribing: The Leave Me Alone email app can only unsubscribe you from senders who follow proper unsubscribe protocols, such as including an unsubscribe link. Unfortunately, this means that less scrupulous senders who ignore unsubscribe requests will continue to flood your inbox.
• No email deletion: When you unsubscribe using Leave Me Alone, it doesn't remove existing emails from that sender, so your inbox remains cluttered with old newsletters and promotional content. Yes, you can delete them manually directly from your mail client, but that's far from convenient.
• Limited inbox access: The app only detects and manages subscription emails, leaving you without access to your complete inbox within the tool. Again, you can partially solve this by having your inbox opened in another tab or window, but I personally find that to be annoying.
• Lack of organization features: Beyond unsubscribing, Leave Me Alone doesn't offer tools for broader inbox organization or cleaning. If you're hoping to declutter your entire inbox, not just subscriptions, you need to look elsewhere.
• No automatic categorization: Unlike some unsubscribe apps that automatically sort your emails into categories (yes, I mean Clean Email), Leave Me Alone doesn't offer this feature. Those who only want to get rid of unwanted subscriptions won't mind, but others might be disappointed.
• Limited automation: The Leave Me Alone app doesn't provide automation for routine email tasks beyond unsubscribing. If you're looking to simplify your inbox management by automatically performing certain actions, then you'll need to continue relying on clunky mail filters or use a Leave Me Alone email app alternative.
• Web-only platform: Leave Me Alone is only available as a web app. Theoretically, web apps can be used even on mobile devices, but I always find the experience to be much worse compared with native mobile apps, and Leave Me Alone is no different in this regard.

Summary

While there is some major overlap between Leave Me Alone and Clean Email (they can both help their users get rid of unwanted subscriptions), Clean Email is a far more comprehensive inbox management solution than Leave Me Alone.

If you're still undecided (perhaps you care many about their unsubscribe capabilities), then I recommend the following:

• Use Leave Me Alone if you are sure the tool does everything you need to do and you don't want to use it long term. The monthly price is very slightly cheaper, making it a reasonable choice for those with simple, short-term needs who are primarily focused on managing subscriptions.
• Use Clean Email if you value extra features. Clean Email's robust privacy policy and wide array of inbox management tools make it the superior choice for users who want more control over their email experience. Its advanced automation, organization features, and multi-platform support provide long-term value that justifies its price point. I especially appreciate the ability to unsubscribe from multiple subscriptions at once, which can save a lot of time, and the fact that I can do so conveniently from a native mobile and not just a web app makes everything even better.