Providers
Three adapters cover the entire market: the Gmail API, Microsoft Graph, and IMAP for everything else. Each maps its own folders onto the same set of roles, so a rule you write once behaves the same everywhere.
The strongest backend. Full-text body search runs on Google's servers, category folders map directly, and deletions go 1,000 messages per call.
Moves mail to Trash, recoverable for 30 days in Gmail. No password is ever shared with us.
Covers outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com and work accounts. Junk Email and Deleted Items map to the spam and trash roles.
Outlook has no Promotions or Social categories, so those roles resolve to nothing — the preview says so rather than widening the search.
Yahoo, iCloud, Mail.com, GMX, Zoho, Fastmail, AOL, Yandex and any other IMAP host. Server settings are discovered from your address.
The handful of providers with a step that catches people out.
Yahoo stopped accepting account passwords over IMAP in 2024. Go to Yahoo Account Security → Generate app password, create one named "Email Cleaner", and paste the 16-character value.
Yahoo files junk under "Bulk Mail", which maps to the spam role automatically.
IMAP is switched off by default. Open Settings → POP3 & IMAP, tick "Enable access to this account via POP3 and IMAP", and save. Then connect with your normal password.
Skipping this step produces an authentication failure with no useful explanation from the server.
An app-specific password is mandatory and two-factor authentication must already be on. Generate one at appleid.apple.com → Sign-In and Security → App-Specific Passwords.
Covers icloud.com, me.com and mac.com.
Create an app password in the provider's security settings whenever two-factor authentication is enabled. Fastmail: Settings → Privacy & Security → App Passwords.
Providers that have not disabled basic authentication still accept a normal password.
Type your address and connect. Settings come from a built-in table, then the Thunderbird autoconfig database covering thousands of domains, then a conventional guess — and the connection is always tested before saving.
If discovery gets it wrong, enter host, port and username manually.
Proton has no public IMAP endpoint. It works only through Proton Mail Bridge running on the same machine as the service, which rules it out for our hosted version.
Self-hosting Email Cleaner alongside Bridge does work.
The app compiles your rule to whatever each provider speaks, and tells you in the preview which filters ran on the server and which ran locally.
| Capability | Gmail | Microsoft | IMAP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full body keyword search | Server-side | Server-side | Server-side |
| Category folders (Promotions, Social…) | Yes | Not available | Not available |
| Date precision | Exact | Exact (re-checked) | Day, re-checked locally |
| Size filter | Yes | Not exposed | Yes |
| Attachment filter | Yes | Yes | Checked locally |
| Results per keyword search | Unlimited | 1,000, auto-split by date | Unlimited |
| Bulk delete batch size | 1,000 | 20 | 200 |
| Undo from Trash | Yes | Yes | Best effort |
Anything a provider cannot do server-side is re-checked locally before deletion — a weaker backend is slower, never less safe.
The free plan covers one mailbox with no card required, and IMAP works immediately.