Unsubscribing vs sorting

Keep every newsletter and receipt. Just not in your inbox.

Unsubscribing cuts mail off for good. Sortmail files it instead — newsletters, receipts and alerts into labels, one search away — so your inbox holds only what needs you. And before any tool reads your inbox, read what it says it does with your data: we quote each one below.

Sort my inbox free What happens to your data

Connect a mailbox and Sortmail sorts your last 30 days (up to 1,000 messages) for free, showing where each one would go and why. Nothing in your mailbox changes until you choose a plan, and you can cancel in one click.

Your inbox: 18 messages instead of 247.

INCOMING

247

new messages

sortmailfiling

In your inbox18

Receipts31

Newsletters64

System134

Arrived247
In your inbox18
Receipts31
Newsletters64
System134

Illustrative example · one day of mail

Why switch

Why switch to Sortmail.

Nothing cut off

Newsletters, receipts and alerts are filed into labels — not unsubscribed, not trashed. Find any of them in seconds.

Every kind of mail, sorted

Not just subscriptions: receipts, notifications, people and the mail you never set a rule for. Each one says why.

Your data stays yours

Message bodies are never stored, and our privacy policy says we do not sell data. Read it word for word below.

Side by side

Sortmail vs unsubscribe tools.

Every claim about unsubscribe tools links to their own page.

Sortmail and Unsubscribe tools, feature by feature
What matters	Sortmail	Unsubscribe tools
Keeps the mail, just out of the way	YesFiled under Sortmail/ labels, out of the inbox, still searchable.	PartlyClean Email moves mail from lists you unsubscribe from or pause to the trash.[3]
Never trashes or deletes mail	YesLabels and archives only; never trashes or deletes.	NoClean Email trashes mail from unsubscribed or paused lists.[3]
Sorts mail you never set a rule for	YesReceipts, notifications, newsletters and personal mail, sorted on arrival.	NoClean Email: if none of your rules applies, mail goes to your inbox as usual.[4]
Connects through Google’s own sign-in	YesYour provider’s own sign-in; Sortmail never sees your password.	PartlyUnroll.Me connects Google accounts with an app password.[2]
Message bodies never stored	YesNever stored; a fingerprint is kept instead.	PartlyClean Email and Leave Me Alone each describe cases where they store message content — quoted below.[5][6]

Yes YesPartly Partly, or with a catchNo No

Your data

What happens to your email data.

A tool that reads your inbox handles your data, so here is what each one says it does with it — in its own words, copied verbatim from its own pages. Where a help page and a privacy policy say different things, both are shown.

Sortmail

“Message bodies, attachments, contact lists. A body is held in memory only while it is sorted or shown to you, and is never written down.”

VerbatimPrivacy policy: what we never storechecked 27 September 2026

“We do not run ads, do not sell data, and do not share data with brokers.”

VerbatimPrivacy policy: what we never dochecked 27 September 2026

“We do not use your mail, or anything derived from it, to develop, train, improve or fine-tune any generalised artificial intelligence or machine learning model. Our model providers are contractually barred from retaining your data or training on it.”

VerbatimPrivacy policy: AI trainingchecked 27 September 2026

Every company that processes data for Sortmail is listed on the sub-processors page.

Unroll.Me

“We don’t charge our users for our service. To keep our users from having to pay, Nielsen Consumer LLC, which owns Unroll.Me, measures e-commerce through a technology that automatically recognizes commercial emails and extracts purchase information from them.”

VerbatimHelp centre: How much does Unroll.Me cost?checked 27 September 2026

“We respect your privacy and don’t share your receipts, emails or any of your personal information with our clients as part of our business model.”

VerbatimHelp centre: How much does Unroll.Me cost?checked 27 September 2026

“If you connect Unroll.Me to one or more of your email inboxes, we will collect copies of and information from the commercial email messages you receive, including but not limited to, transactional emails, purchase receipts, sales receipts, delivery confirmations and returns, subscription confirmations and cancellations, registration confirmations, and marketing and promotional emails.”

VerbatimPrivacy noticechecked 27 September 2026

“USA: We may “sell” or “share” (as those terms are defined in applicable U.S. law) some types of Personal Information to third parties. If you enroll to use our Services as a panelist, we may provide Personal Information such as data about the Commercial Emails you receive, as well as some of your demographic characteristics, to customers such as e-commerce businesses, investment companies, consumer brands, media companies, and data brokers.”

VerbatimPrivacy noticechecked 27 September 2026

“As a reminder, your directly identifiable Personal Information will never be sold or shared with Unroll.Me’s customers to target you or sell to you.”

VerbatimPrivacy noticechecked 27 September 2026

“Unrollme Inc. reached a settlement with the FTC over allegations that the company deceived some consumers about how it accesses and uses their personal emails.”

VerbatimFederal Trade Commission, case summary (order finalised December 17, 2019)checked 27 September 2026

Clean Email

“Clean Email never downloads full emails. Our algorithms only analyze email headers that contain subject line, sender and recipient information, dates, email size, and similar metadata. Email body and attachments are not downloaded. Data only stored for 45 days.”

VerbatimHome pagechecked 27 September 2026

“We only access the envelope and header information associated with your emails. The actual bodies of your emails are never downloaded or accessed within our computer systems.”

VerbatimPrivacy policychecked 27 September 2026

“Please note that if you click a message in Clean Email to view a preview of the message body, we have to download the message body temporarily in order to show it to you. Also, if you use the Auto Clean feature to remove unwanted messages, we temporarily download and store the message bodies of the deleted messages.”

VerbatimHelp centre: Connecting your email accountchecked 27 September 2026

“In no case do we ever read or analyze the message bodies for any purpose.”

VerbatimHelp centre: Connecting your email accountchecked 27 September 2026

Leave Me Alone

“To further ensure this is never a possibility we don't store any email content (unless we need it to create your Rollups).”

VerbatimPricing page FAQchecked 27 September 2026

“If you use our Rollups feature, when you add emails to a Rollup then we fetch, encrypt, and store the content of those emails in order to create your Rollup.”

VerbatimSecurity pagechecked 27 September 2026

“If you also turn on Spam Blocker, we read the content of those emails to classify them, and we keep some of that content to train our own classifiers.”

VerbatimSecurity pagechecked 27 September 2026

“We don't sell user data, and we don't share it publicly or with anyone except the companies listed below, or when required to by law.”

VerbatimPrivacy policychecked 27 September 2026

The proof

What you get, and what it looks like.

Real labels, your mailbox

The sorting lives in your mailbox, not in an app.

On Gmail, each category is an ordinary label — Sortmail/Receipts, Sortmail/Newsletters — and filed mail leaves the inbox. On Outlook, it is a category of the same name, and filed mail moves to Archive. They show up in every mail app you use, and they stay if you stop using Sortmail.

With unsubscribe tools: Unsubscribing stops the mail for good, and Clean Email moves mail from lists you unsubscribe from or pause to the trash.[3]

Your mailbox’s labelsAny mail app

Inbox6
Sortmail/Receipts31
Sortmail/Newsletters48
Sortmail/System102
Sortmail/Personal

Illustrative example

Bodies never stored

Classified in memory, then forgotten.

Sortmail keeps a fingerprint of each message — the sender, a keyed hash of the subject, the category and why it was chosen. The database has no column for a message body. Rules and header signals decide first; only when they cannot does a masked extract of at most 400 characters go to a model, and that can be switched off per mailbox. Your mail trains nothing.

Kept

Sender address
A keyed hash of the subject
The category
Why it was chosen

Never stored

The message body
The subject as text
Anything to train a model on

Illustrative example

You can see why

Every filed message carries its reason.

Open any message and Sortmail shows what decided it — one of your rules, your own correction, sender signals or the model — and, where it weighed evidence, how sure it was. When something lands in the wrong place, you know whether to fix a rule or just move it.

Your order has shippedHarbor Goods · [email protected]

Why this is hereReceipts

Decided bySender signals

Confidence94%

Sender[email protected]

Where it wentSortmail/Receipts, out of the inbox

Illustrative example

Your categories

Five to start. Rename them, or add your own.

Every account starts with Actionable, Personal, Receipts, Newsletters and System. Rename any of them, recolour them, choose which stay in the inbox, or add your own — Clients, School, Travel — up to 8. Sortmail sorts into the categories you set, not a fixed list.

Your categoriesRename, recolour, add

ActionableStays in inbox
PersonalStays in inbox
ReceiptsFiled
ReadingFiled · renamed
SystemFiled
ClientsStays in inbox · added by you

Illustrative example

Corrections stick

Move a message once. It becomes a rule.

Put a message in the right category and Sortmail saves a rule for that sender in the same step. The rule outranks the model from then on, and it is listed on the Overrides screen where you can remove it. On Gmail, moving a message between Sortmail labels in any Gmail app counts as the same correction.

You move “Weekly product digest” to NewslettersSystemNewsletters

Rule saved: sender is [email protected] → NewslettersListed on Overrides. Remove it any time.

Next week’s digest files itselfWhy this is here: One of your rules

Illustrative example

Honest billing

Easy to leave, and told before every charge.

Cancel in one click in Billing — no call, no form. You get an email 21 days before each yearly or 2-year renewal and 3 days before each monthly one, and any price change is emailed before it takes effect.

Renewal reminder21 days ahead on yearly and 2-year plans, 3 on monthly

CancelOne button in Billing. No call, no form.

Price changeEmailed before it applies, so you can leave first

Illustrative example

Pricing

Every feature. One price.

Sortmail’s prices come straight from our billing code.

Billed	Founding	List
Monthly	$8.99 / month	$12.99 / month
Yearly	$79 / year$6.58 a month	$99 / year$8.25 a month
Every 2 years	$139 / 2 years$5.79 a month	$169 / 2 years$7.04 a month

Founding price for the first 500 subscribers, kept for as long as the subscription runs. Each extra mailbox is $4.49 a month at the founding price ($6.49 at list), or half the plan price on yearly and 2-year plans.

Unroll.Me doesn’t charge you. Its own help page explains how it is paid for instead — quoted word for word in the data section above.[1]

Sortmail is paid for by the people who use it, and nothing else.

On the 2-year plan, Sortmail works out at $5.79 a month at the founding price — about 19¢ a day for an inbox that only holds what needs you.

Zero risk

Try it on your own mail. Pay only if it earns it.

See it sorted before you pay

Connect a mailbox and Sortmail sorts your last 30 days — up to 1,000 messages — and shows where each one would go and why. Nothing in your mailbox changes until you choose a plan.

Leave in one click

Cancel from Billing — no call, no form. You’re emailed 21 days before every yearly or 2-year renewal and 3 days before a monthly one. Your labels stay if you go.

Founding price, locked in

$5.79 a month on the 2-year plan, $6.58 on yearly, $8.99 monthly. Limited to the first 500 subscribers, and kept for as long as you subscribe.

Sort my inbox free

FAQ

Questions, answered.

Does Sortmail unsubscribe me from newsletters?

It does better for the ones you like: it files them under Sortmail/Newsletters, out of the inbox, ready when you are. For the rest, the unsubscribe link in any message still works.

Does Sortmail sell or share my email data?

No. Its privacy policy says: “We do not run ads, do not sell data, and do not share data with brokers.” Message bodies are never stored, and every company that processes data for Sortmail is listed on the sub-processors page.

Will I still find old receipts?

Yes. Receipts are filed under Sortmail/Receipts in your own mailbox, and your provider’s search finds them like any other mail.

How much does Sortmail cost?

One plan with every feature: $8.99 a month, $79 a year or $139 for 2 years at the founding price, kept for as long as you subscribe. Once the 500 founding seats are gone, new subscribers pay $12.99, $99 or $169.

Is an AI reading all my mail?

No. Your rules decide first, then header signals such as mailing-list headers. Only when neither settles it does a masked extract — sender, subject and at most 400 characters — go to a model, and you can switch that off per mailbox. The model provider is contractually barred from keeping or training on it.

What happens to my mail if I stop using Sortmail?

Nothing moves back or disappears. The labels (categories, on Outlook) are ordinary ones in your own mailbox, so they stay where they are and keep working in every mail app.

Sources, checked 27 September 2026

Unroll.Me doesn’t charge users; its owner, Nielsen Consumer LLC, measures e-commerce by extracting purchase information from commercial emails. support.unroll.me
Connecting a Google mailbox to Unroll.Me uses two-step verification and an app password. support.unroll.me
Clean Email unsubscribes by emailing senders, following unsubscribe links and completing forms, and moves later messages from those lists to the trash. clean.email
If none of your Clean Email rules applies to an incoming message, it is delivered to your inbox. clean.email
Clean Email temporarily downloads and stores the message bodies of messages removed by Auto Clean. clean.email
Leave Me Alone fetches, encrypts and stores the content of emails added to a Rollup. leavemealone.com

Competitor details are taken from each company’s own public pages on the date above and can change after it. Sortmail’s own details are read from the code that enforces them. Unroll.Me, Leave Me Alone and Clean Email are trademarks of their owners; Sortmail is not affiliated with any of them. Spotted something out of date? Tell us at [email protected] and we will correct it.