Why your inbox is valuable to other people
Your inbox is a record of what you buy, where you travel, who you bank with and which apps you use. Receipts alone say a lot: which ride service you use and how often, which stores you order from, what you spend. Put millions of inboxes together and that record becomes market research that companies will pay for, even with names removed.
That is not a theory. The Unroll.me page sets out what was reported and what the Federal Trade Commission found, with sources. The short version: in 2017 The New York Times reported that the parent company of a free cleanup service sold anonymized data drawn from users' emailed receipts, and in 2019 the FTC alleged the service had misled people about how it used their e-receipts. The company settled.
What to look for in a private cleanup tool
- A plain price. A tool you pay for has a business that does not depend on your data. A tool that is free forever has to make money somewhere.
- A plain no on selling data. Read the privacy policy for the words sell, share and partners. Anonymized or aggregated data is still data drawn from your mail.
- Headers, not bodies. To sort mail by sender, a tool needs who sent it and when. It does not need to keep the text of your messages.
- Limited access. An app password opens the mailbox only and can be deleted on its own.
- Easy to leave. Deleting your account should delete what the tool holds, and ending its access should take one step.
- Nothing deleted behind your back. A tool that moves mail to a folder you control can be wrong without costing you anything.
How Mail Housekeeper is paid, and what it keeps
Mail Housekeeper is paid by the people who use it: a free scan, $8 once per mailbox for the full cleanup, and optional nightly upkeep at $19 a year or $2.49 a month. During the launch trial every step is free. There is no advertising business behind it and no data business.
- We never sell or share your data. Not raw, not anonymized, not aggregated per person.
- Headers only. We store the sender, the subject line up to 160 characters, the date, whether you opened it and the unsubscribe header. Message bodies and attachments are never stored.
- One sample, never kept. To check that a sender is a real business before an unsubscribe, the checker reads the first few kilobytes of one message per sender, once, and throws it away.
- Your password stays yours. You connect with an app password, sealed with AES-256-GCM. Delete it at your provider and our access ends.
- Nothing is deleted by the software. Cleared mail moves to Housekeeper hold inside your own mailbox.
- Our own visit counter. The website counts visits on our own server, with no third-party analytics script and no IP address stored. Nothing about your mail or your senders ever goes into it.
- Delete your account and the records go. Your mailbox stays exactly as it is, holding folder included.
The anonymous numbers we do use are counts per rule, such as how often people override a recommended pile, which help the defaults get better for everyone. They contain no addresses, no senders and no subjects.
The trade you are making
A private cleanup costs a few dollars once. A free one may cost something you cannot see on the price tag. Either can be the right choice, as long as you know which one you are making. The alternatives page lays out the facts about the best known cleaners, with sources, and the privacy policy has every detail of ours in plain words.