"Sort my email with AI" means one thing: stop making me decide, message by message, what matters. The outcome you want is an inbox that holds only the mail that needs you, with everything else filed and explained. Sortmail does exactly that for Gmail and Outlook, from the day you connect, and it tells you why it put each message where it did.
What Sortmail does
Every new message lands in one of five categories: Actionable, Personal, Receipts, Newsletters and System. You can rename them or add your own, up to 8. Actionable and Personal stay in the inbox. The rest are labelled and archived, as ordinary Gmail labels or Outlook categories in your own mailbox.
- Sorted on day one. Your last month is sorted before you pay, so you see the result on your own mail instead of waiting weeks for a tool to learn.
- Reasons for every message. Each one shows what decided it, whether a rule, a header signal, the model or your correction, and how confident the decision was.
- Corrections stick. Move a message and a rule is written for that sender in the same step, so it beats the model from then on.
- A daily digest at the hour you choose: what stayed in your inbox, and what was filed and why.
- Works where you already read mail. Free Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook.com and Microsoft 365, in any app.
A summary on top of a full inbox is not the same thing
Some tools answer inbox overload by writing a summary of it. The summary sits on top of the same full inbox: every receipt, newsletter and notification is still there, still unread, still between you and the people who are waiting on you. You read the summary, then you read the inbox.
Sortmail empties the inbox instead. Filed mail is out of the way under its label, and what is left is short enough that you do not need a summary of it. There is also no AI add-on to buy from your mail provider: Sortmail works on a free Gmail account as well as on paid plans.
What Gmail already sorts, and where it stops
Inbox tabs
Gmail can split the inbox into a main tab and tabs for promotions, social, updates and forums. You choose which appear under the gear icon, "See all settings", then the Inbox tab. Dragging a message to another tab offers to do the same for that sender.
Importance markers
Gmail also guesses which messages are important from who you reply to and what you open, and can show important and unread mail first. You switch it on in the same Inbox settings.
Both are free. Their limits are concrete:
- The tabs are fixed. You cannot rename one, and you cannot add Receipts, Clients or School.
- Nothing leaves the inbox. Tabs divide it rather than clearing it, unread counts and all.
- There is no explanation. When a message lands in the wrong tab, nothing says why, so you cannot predict the next one.
- You cannot see what your moves taught it, or overrule it with a rule that always wins.
- The importance guess is about who you engage with, not whether someone is waiting on you. A colleague’s FYI and a colleague’s urgent question look the same to it.
- Hand-written filters fill some gaps, but they match only what you anticipated and break when a sender changes address or wording.
What to ask any tool before it reads your mail
A tool that sorts your mail has to read it, so these questions matter more than any feature list. Here is how Sortmail answers each one.
- Permissions: on Gmail, one mail permission (gmail.modify), which Google requires for labelling and which does not include permanent deletion. It would allow sending and trashing, so the guarantee is our code: it calls no send, draft or trash endpoint, and a test fails the build if one is added. On Outlook, read and write access to your own mail, and no permission to send.
- Rules first: your rules and corrections decide before anything else. If none matches, a mailing-list or automated-sender header can settle it. Only if neither does is a short, masked extract, the sender, subject and opening lines of the body, sent to a language model.
- An off switch: model sorting is on by default and can be turned off per mailbox. With it off, only headers leave your mailbox, and anything no rule or header places goes to System.
- Retention: message bodies are never stored. The database has no column for one.
- Training: your mail is not used to train anything, and the model provider is contractually barred from retaining or training on it.
- Pricing: one flat price with every feature. Sorting new mail is unlimited, with no credits or per-message charges.
- Leaving: the labels stay in your mailbox. Disconnecting stops sorting; deleting your account purges it from our live systems within 24 hours, and encrypted backups expire within 30 days.
Ask the same questions of anything else you consider. A tool that cannot answer them plainly, in writing, is telling you something.
Why rules first matters
Most of your mail never needs a model. Receipts from a shop you corrected once, newsletters with a mailing-list header, notices from an automated sender: rules and headers place them, with nothing sent anywhere. That is why sorting can be unlimited at one flat price, and why decisions get more predictable as your corrections add up.
See your own inbox sorted
Connect a mailbox and Sortmail sorts the last 30 days of your inbox (up to 1,000 messages) free, showing where each message would go and why. It is a preview rather than a trial: nothing is written to your mailbox, no labels and no archiving, until you choose a plan. You judge it on your own mail before you pay anything.
One plan, with every feature in it: $8.99 a month, $79 a year or $139 for 2 years at the founding price, limited to the first 500 subscribers and locked for as long as the subscription runs. A year costs less than 9 months of monthly, and 2 years less than 16. After the founding seats it is $12.99 a month, $99 a year or $169 for 2 years. Cancel in one click in Billing.