Cleanfox: Get rid of the Tinder mailing lists

Over time, our email account begins to fill with messages that are not entirely interesting: notifications, spam and mailing lists that you do not remember subscribing to are in the order of the day. The solution: unsubscribe from mailing lists.

You can unsubscribe manually or with the help of Gmail, but after many years reaping mailing lists the task can be titanic. Cleanfox is an application that helps you clean up your junk mail account at the swipes of Tinder, similar to Unroll.me.

What is Cleanfox for?

Image Source: Google Image

Cleanfox is predominantly an application to clean up your email account. It is compatible with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and any other IMAP email account and what it does is analyze your mail in search of mailing lists.

Then it will show you a succession of cards with what you have found, giving you the option to keep the messages, delete them or delete them and also unsubscribe from the list. For the latter, use the typical “if you want to unsubscribe, write to this address” links found in many messages.

First, add your email account

Obviously, the first thing you need to do is add your email account to Cleanfox. The application is compatible with the vast majority of services, accepting Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail / Outlook. All other providers should also work, as long as they have IMAP enabled, although in this case it may be a bit more difficult to configure.

Adding your Gmail account is extremely easy, especially if it is the same account that you have already set up on Android. All you need to do is select the account and grant it the necessary permissions. In this case, Cleanfox needs full control to read, send and delete mail.

Image Source: Google Image

Probably I’ll pull you back a bit to give so much power to an application you just discovered, and it’s a good way to think. In the application ensures again and again that it is a 100% free and safe application, which earns the bread by transmitting anonymous statistics on online shopping habits and Internet.

As in the case of Unroll.me, the statistics that are generated have the personal information censored. You can read the privacy policy, which for once is written in plain words although. Although CleanFox does not sell your information to third parties or use it for advertising, if you are concerned about your privacy, you will probably prefer to clean your mail manually and without any intervention, of course.

You may also like to read: 8 advantages of having a mobile app for your business

Analyze your mail

Image Source: Google Image

Cleanfox needs to “read your mail”, which can take a few minutes if you are one of those who accumulate thousands of messages. If you want to go get yourself a coffee, it’s a good time, although it sure is over before you come back. You do not need to do anything for now. It will be in the next step when you have to choose the destination of each mailing list that CleanFox detects in your account.

In my tests I had to do this analysis twice for my Gmail, because I was “disconnected” while using it. During its use CleanFox needs to move, send and delete many messages and it is possible that it is Google itself that disconnects it for suspecting that something is wrong. In any case, everything was fixed with a reconnection.

Clean your mail, sliding

Image Source: Google Image

When the analysis ends, you will start to see a succession of cards with information about different mail chains. Normally, they correspond to notifications and mailing lists. You can see the sender and how many messages you have received.

As in Tinder, you can manipulate the cards by sliding them to one side or the other. In this case, there are three possibilities that you have, which correspond to the buttons that appear in the lower part of the window …

• Slide up: Do nothing, keep messages as is.
• Swipe left: Delete messages.
• Swipe to the right: Delete the messages and try to delete the subscription.

All this process happens in the background and in an invisible way, so you can eliminate a lot of subscriptions in record time. What would have taken you several hours in Gmail will cost you a few minutes to exercise your finger.

Cleanfox uses the email addresses provided by the mailing lists themselves to unsubscribe. In fact, if you visit the label Sent from your mail you will see all the messages that CleanFox has sent in the process.

These email addresses do not always exist, so you may receive “no address found” messages in your email. This is normal and the best thing you can do in this case is to erase them as they arrive.

In short, clean your email account with CleanFox is quite simple, in exchange for a bit of your privacy, anonymized or not. With the plague of spam and mailing lists to which our inboxes are subjected, all help is little and the main asset of CleanFox is to make the process more entertaining and basically the only alternative to Unroll.me, for now.