SaneBox alternatives in 2026, compared

At a glance

Checked on 30 September 2026 on each product's site. Prices and features change: check before you buy.

When each one fits

Choose SaneBox if you use Outlook, Microsoft 365 or Exchange, or several very different providers, and you're happy with its way of sorting into its own folders. It has been around the longest of the group.

Choose Clean Email if your main problem is years of accumulated mail and you want to clear it in bulk with rules and suggestions.

Choose Leave Me Alone if what you want is to stop newsletters: bulk unsubscribing and a daily or weekly digest of the ones you keep.

Stay with Gmail's tools if the five tabs are enough for you and you don't mind writing filters by hand. Gmail also has "Manage subscriptions" to unsubscribe from senders one by one, in some countries.

Choose MailTag if you want:

• your own categories, like Investors, Invoices or Clients, each described in one line, instead of fixed folders or tabs;
• Gmail and other IMAP inboxes (iCloud, Yahoo, Fastmail, your own domain) sorted the same way, right in the app you already use;
• privacy you can check: the sorting runs on MailTag's own servers in the EU, the email's content is never stored or sent to another company, and MailTag can't send or delete email;
• to connect AI agents with limits, on every plan: an agent sees only the categories and days you allow. See How to give Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor access to your email safely.

MailTag also finds the senders that fill your inbox and unsubscribes you in bulk, and everything it did can be undone: Settings → Mailboxes → Remove labels takes all its labels and folders out.

Privacy: ask how they read your email

Every tool here needs access to your mailbox, so it's worth asking what each one reads, where, and what it keeps. A cautionary example: in 2019 the US Federal Trade Commission alleged that Unroll.me, a free unsubscribe service, told users it wouldn't touch their personal emails while its parent company used e-receipts from users' inboxes in market-research products. Unroll.me settled, and the order required it to delete the stored e-receipts.

Questions worth asking any of them: does it read the email body or only headers? Is anything stored, and for how long? Which company processes it, and in which country? Can it send or delete mail?

FAQ

Is there a free SaneBox alternative?

Gmail's tabs and filters are free. MailTag has a free plan that sorts 100 emails a month with your own categories, and Leave Me Alone lets you unsubscribe from 10 senders for free.

Does MailTag work with Outlook?

Not yet. It works with Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, Fastmail and any mailbox that offers IMAP with an app password.

Can I use MailTag and SaneBox together?

It's possible, but both would be moving and labeling the same mail, which gets confusing. Try one at a time.

How do I switch from SaneBox to MailTag?

Connect your mailbox to MailTag, write your categories, and turn SaneBox off. MailTag can also sort your older email once with a one-time tidy-up (paid, or included once a year on yearly plans), so the whole inbox follows your new categories.