Built by someone who needed it first.
It started with me trying to organize my life one thing at a time, beginning with the inbox we all live in. Twenty years and 61,000 messages later, this is the tool I built to do it, made simple enough for anyone.
Why this exists
Honestly, this started with me trying to get my life organized, one thing at a time. And the first thing I picked was the one we all live in every day: email. It is our front door to the digital world. Bills, receipts, appointments, family, friends, it all lands there.
Mine was a mess. Twenty years of it, 61,000 messages, most of them from stores I bought from once. Every time I opened it I felt behind before I even started, and the few emails that actually mattered got buried.
Every cleaner I tried wanted to delete things, or wanted my real password, or charged me every month for something I needed done once. So I built my own. It looks at who sent what, groups everything by company, and asks me once per company instead of once per email. Anything it clears goes into a folder inside my own mailbox, so nothing is gone until I say so. It worked through the whole inbox in waves of 10,000, which is all Yahoo shows a program at a time.
Mail Housekeeper is that same tool, made simple enough for anyone: a review page that works on your phone, a nightly pass that keeps things clean, and a checker in front of every unsubscribe. The rules it will not break are the ones I would not break on my own mail.
Here is what surprised me. Once my inbox was in order, the rest of my life got a little easier to keep in order too. I stopped missing things. I answered what mattered. I got some quiet back. That is really what this is about. We all have to start somewhere, and this is a good place to start.
Audie, Dallas, Texas
What the method did on its first job
Audie's own Yahoo inbox. Yours will differ; the zero will not.
What we never do
None of these is a setting. They hold on the free scan and on every paid plan.
- Delete a message. Clearing means moving to the holding folder; emptying it to Trash takes a button you confirm.
- Store a message body. Headers and a short snippet of the subject only.
- Ask for your real password. An app password you can revoke, sealed with AES-256-GCM.
- Click a link inside a message. Unsubscribes use the mail header, the same way Gmail and Yahoo do.
- Unsubscribe from a sender that looks like phishing, failed the checker, or has been silent for a year. Those are moved only.
- Touch receipts, orders, tracking, account notices, legal or medical mail, even inside a company you clear.
- Move mail from the last 48 hours. Today's mail stays where you are reading it.
- Sell or share your data, or show it to anyone outside the small team that runs the service.
Small, and in plain words
A small operation
Built and run from Dallas, Texas. Support is a person reading email, and suggestions from the Account page land on Audie's desk.
Plain words everywhere
No jargon on the pages, no raw status codes, no scare screens. If a sentence here would not make sense to a parent, it gets rewritten.
Your mailbox stays yours
Everything happens inside it, over a key you can revoke. Delete your account and every record here is gone within minutes; your mail is untouched.
It gets better with use
Every override you make teaches the defaults for your mailbox. Across everyone, only counts per rule are kept, never addresses or subjects.
Questions about any of this: Support. The full promises in writing: Privacy and Terms.
Start with a free scan
Connect a mailbox and see every sender grouped by company. Nothing moves until you say so.