Folders and Smart Folders
Smart Folders are predefined filters applied to your mailbox. Clean Email uses “Smart Folders” to organize your email messages, making it easy to go through your mail in minutes.
In addition to presenting your mailbox as folders or labels, we find messages matching a common set of parameters. These can be as simple as “Top senders” or as complex as "Automated messages", messages where "You are CC-ed”, "Misc notifications", and "Finance" messages. We organize your mail by date, size, senders and recipients, and other factors.
As a result, you can easily see messages across all folders or labels and clean them (e.g., delete, label, or move them) by group. This approach eliminates the need to go through each message one by one. It helps you to quickly find messages that are old and large, or remove (or archive) all messages in a folder or label with a single click.
Smart Folders never include messages marked as spam, or messages you have pinned.
By default, each Smart Folder includes all other messages in your mailbox. For your convenience, the “In Inbox” filter may be applied automatically, so that you only see messages in your inbox. If you prefer to remove the filter and see all matching items from your entire account instead, simply click the X to remove the filter.
📌 Note: For more information on the differences between Clean Email and standard email clients, please see our article here.
Working with Smart Folders
Please use the following links to jump to the desired section of this article.
- Working with Groups
- Sorting Groups in Smart Folder
- Marking Smart Folders as Favorites
- Selecting Multiple Groups in a Smart Folder
- Using the Action Bar
- Filtering Groups in a Smart Folder
- Previewing Group Contents
Working with Groups
Messages in a Smart Folder can be grouped by a number of parameters. Clean Email supports grouping by:
- Sender – The sender's name + email address (for your convenience, messages from the same email address with two different names will be shown as separate groups)
- Sender’s Email - Takes into consideration only the sender’s email address
- Subject - The subject of the email messages
- Date – Month and year when email was sent or received
- Labels (or folders)
- Recipients – The email addresses of recipients
To control message grouping, click the funnel button near the top of the page.
Then, in the drop-down menu that appears, click Group By and select the desired grouping option.
For example, in the "All Messages" Smart Folder, you could group messages by "Labels/Folders":
For each message group listed, you can see some basic information about the group at a glance:
- A blue dot to the left of the group indicates that the group contains at least one unread message.
- A yellow star to the right of the group indicates that the group contains at least one message that you have marked with a star or a flag.
- The number displayed to the right of a group shows the total number of messages in the group.
Sorting Groups in a Smart Folder
Smart Folders may include specific sort sequences by default. You can control how the groups are sorted by clicking the sort control at the top right-hand corner of the list.
For example, you can view your "Top Senders" Smart Folder sorted with the largest groups at the top of the list, to make it easy to find and delete the largest messages.
To continue the example, you could further refine the view above by filtering it to include only older messages.
For more information about filtering messages, please see our article Search and Filter.
Marking Smart Folders as Favorites
The Favorites feature lets you customize any Smart Folder with your preferred filters and search terms, and save those settings as a favorite.
For complete details, please see Favorites.
Selecting Multiple Message Groups
You can quickly act on more than one group of messages at a time by clicking the icon for any given group. All groups’ icons turn to blue selection circles, and you can click the circle next to each group to select additional groups as needed.
By default, all messages in the selected groups are included in any actions you might take via the action bar at the bottom of the page.
If you do not want to act on all messages in the group, you can select the individual messages that you do want to act on by clicking the blue selection circle next to each desired message in the preview pane.
After selecting multiple groups or messages, you can take action on all of the selected groups or messages using the action bar at the bottom of the window pane.
Using the Action Bar
When you click a single group, or use the multi-select option to select multiple groups, a blue action bar appears at the bottom of the window pane.
The action bar is dynamic, presenting a specific set of actions depending on your currently selected view. For example, the action bar illustrated above is shown in a Smart Folder. When using the Unsubscriber, the action bar offers a different set of actions, such as Unsubscribe and Keep Receiving. For more information about the Unsubscriber, please see our article here.
The buttons in the action bar allow you to take actions on all selected messages at the same time.
⚠️ Please use caution when taking actions on multiple message groups at the same time.
When viewing a Smart Folder, you can apply the following actions to the selected messages:
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| Trash | Moves messages to the trash |
| Mark Read | Marks messages as read |
| Mark Unread | Marks messages as unread |
| Remove Star | Removes the star or flag from any messages that have been starred/flagged |
| Star | Selects the star or flag for all messages in all selected groups |
| Keep Newest | Prompts you to confirm that you want to keep only the most recent message from among all selected groups and messages. Only a single message will be kept. For more information, please see Keeping Only the Newest in One or More Groups of Messages. |
| Read Later | Moves the selected message groups to Read Later folder |
| Move | Opens the Choose Folder dialog. Click the drop-down and select the folder to which you want to move all messages.  |
| Labels | Opens the Choose Labels dialog:
 |
| Archive | Archives messages: In Google email accounts, the “Inbox” label is removed from messages and messages are moved to the “All Mail” label. In other types of email accounts, the messages are removed from the Inbox folder and may be placed in an “Archive” folder. |
| Spam | Marks messages as spam |
| Delete | Permanently deletes all selected messages Warning: Message deletion is permanent and irreversible. Use caution when deleting multiple messages at the same time. |
| Create Rule | Opens the Auto Clean rule creation dialog with preset options based on the selected groups. For more information, please see Creating Auto Clean Rules. |
For more information about each of the available actions, check our article Actions Clean Email Supports.
If you click the X at the top right-hand corner of the action bar, the action bar closes and all selections are cleared.
Filtering Groups in a Smart Folder
Smart Folders automatically apply certain filters by default. For example, Smart Folders never include messages identified as spam. As another example, the Smart Folder Top senders only includes messages from the senders who have sent you the most messages. You can apply additional filters to the Smart Folder contents using the funnel button.
For more information, please see our article Search and Filter.
Previewing Group Contents
When you click one of the groups, the right-hand side of the page shows a preview of the messages in that group. For more information, please see Previewing Messages.
Related Articles
For more information about Smart Folders, please check out the following articles:
- Differences Between Clean Email Views and Standard Email Clients
- Searching and Filtering
- Previewing Messages
- Actions Clean Email Supports
Please contact us and we will be happy to help.
