Ciela is a free desktop app that reads what's already in your Gmail or Outlook inbox, groups it by sender, and shows you what's worth keeping. Everything happens on your computer — no accounts to create, no password to store, no second copy of your mailbox in the cloud.
The first read of a 100,000-email inbox typically takes 5–20 minutes. After that, an incremental rescan finishes in seconds. The app works offline once the first scan is done.
Ciela opens Google's or Microsoft's sign-in page in your browser. After you approve, the page closes itself and we listen for the answer on your own machine. No password stored.
Ciela reads sender, subject, and snippet for each message — never the body — and classifies it locally. You can watch the categories build as it goes, or close the window and let it work.
Twenty-one plain-language categories. One row per sender, with a count, last-read date, and a quiet badge if they've been active recently. Sort the noise to the top and the people you love to the bottom — or the other way around.
Pick a sender or a whole category and choose Move to Trash. Filter by "older than" so the last ninety days stay safe. Recently-active senders get pulled out automatically — we'll ask before we touch them.
Some senders are a mix. Keep the receipts. Trash the noise.
Amazon sends your order confirmations and their marketing blasts from the same address. Most cleaners make you choose: all or nothing. Ciela doesn't.
A rule-based engine — written in Rust, running locally, with no machine-learning API in the loop — looks at the sender domain, subject, snippet, and the List-Unsubscribe header. It assigns each message to one of twenty-one plain categories.
Senders with mixed behaviour — Amazon sending both receipts and marketing, for example — get split into separate, independently actionable rows. Trash the marketing. Keep every receipt.
Reclassify any sender by hand and the correction persists across rescans. The engine learns your preferences without ever sending them anywhere.
Every screen has to
make sense the first
time you see it.
Ciela is built for the patient, curious person who is overwhelmed by their inbox but unwilling to hand it to a service they don't trust. If a screen would confuse them, it doesn't ship.
Other inbox cleaners ask you to grant a server full access to your mail, then read, index, and in some cases monetize what they find. Ciela's architecture makes that impossible.
Useful software should be accessible to everyone — the college student who can't afford a subscription and the parent who doesn't understand why email costs money to clean. Ciela is not venture-backed. The personal edition is free and always will be.
Don't see yours? Email us.
Genuinely free. Every feature listed on this page is included, with no usage caps, no watermarks, and no "upgrade to unlock" prompts hidden anywhere in the app.
No. Ciela reads only sender address, subject line, message snippet (the first ~150 characters Gmail already shows in your inbox), and the List-Unsubscribe header. Attachments and full message bodies are never downloaded.
Ciela calls Gmail's API and moves those messages to your Trash folder — exactly the same place they'd go if you trashed them by hand. Gmail keeps Trash for thirty days, so anything you change your mind on can be restored from Gmail itself.
Gmail's API limits how fast a single app can read from a single mailbox. Ciela batches requests to stay safely under the ceiling — typically 5–20 minutes for a 100,000-email inbox. After that, incremental scans take seconds. Scans resume from a checkpoint if interrupted, so you can close the app at any time.
All three platforms ship today — Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Linux (AMD64 AppImage). The fastest way to follow updates is the changelog — we don't have a mailing list, by design.
Yes. Ciela is not yet code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen flags it as an unfamiliar app. Click "More info" then "Run anyway." This warning will go away once code signing is in place — it's on the roadmap.
Yes. Gmail and Outlook / Hotmail / Microsoft 365 are both supported. Connect as many accounts as you like — add them from Settings and switch between them in one click. iCloud and Fastmail are on the roadmap but unscheduled.