Ciela is a free desktop app that reads what's already in your Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, Fastmail, or any IMAP 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.
Gmail and Outlook open their sign-in page in your browser — OAuth2, no password stored. iCloud, Yahoo, Fastmail, and 32 other IMAP providers connect with an app-specific password stored in your OS keychain. Connect as many accounts as you like.
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.
Gmail and Outlook connect via OAuth2 — no password, ever. Every other provider connects via IMAP with an app-specific password stored in your OS keychain, never on disk. Connect as many accounts as you like and switch between them in one click.
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.
Ciela does more than bulk-trash. It keeps a full record of every clean, surfaces the senders that keep coming back, and lets you set rules so the next scan handles them automatically.
Every scan is logged with a before/after count per category. Click any scan to see exactly what was trashed, rescued, or permanently gone — with per-message Undo for anything still recoverable.
Set a rule once — "always trash Dead marketing older than 90 days" — and Ciela runs it automatically at the end of every full scan. No clicking required.
Outlook users can create and manage inbox rules directly in Microsoft 365 from Ciela's Settings. Mail is sorted before it even reaches your inbox.
After a scan, Ciela watches for senders that immediately return with new mail — and surfaces them in a single tray so you can deal with them in one step.
Noise percentage, read rate by category, ghost subscriptions you haven't opened in months, peak mail hours, inbox health trend across your last 8 scans — all computed locally from your scan data.
Connect Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and Yahoo side by side. Add accounts from Settings and switch between them in a single click — each scanned and tracked independently.
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, and the List-Unsubscribe header. For Gmail and Outlook accounts it also reads the message snippet (the first ~150 characters already shown in your inbox list). IMAP accounts (iCloud, Yahoo, etc.) have no snippet — only sender and subject. Full message bodies and attachments are never downloaded.
Ciela calls your email provider's API (or IMAP server) and moves those messages to your Trash folder — exactly the same place they'd go if you trashed them by hand in your email app. Anything you change your mind on can be restored from your provider's Trash.
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. IMAP accounts (iCloud, Yahoo, etc.) are slower than Gmail or Outlook because there's no batch API; expect a few minutes for a typical inbox. After the first scan, incremental rescans 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 connect via OAuth2 — no password stored. iCloud, Yahoo, Zoho Mail, AOL, Fastmail, GMX, and 32+ other providers connect via IMAP using an app-specific password stored in your OS keychain. Connect as many accounts as you like — add them from Settings and switch between them in one click.
Gmail and Outlook / Hotmail / Microsoft 365 connect via OAuth2. Ciela also ships with 32 preset IMAP providers: iCloud, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Fastmail, GMX, Zoho Mail, Mail.com, Comcast, AT&T, Cox, Spectrum, Verizon, EarthLink, T-Online, Web.de, IONOS, BT Internet, Bell Canada, Rogers, Orange, Telstra, and more. A Custom IMAP option covers any provider not on the list — just enter your host and port.
Select your provider from the list on the Connect screen, then enter your email and an app-specific password (a separate password you generate in your provider's security settings — not your main login). Ciela tests the connection live and stores the credential in your OS keychain. Your main account password is never used or stored. Setup takes about two minutes.
Yes. Auto-clean rules let you tell Ciela to always trash a specific category or sender at the end of every full scan — set it once, runs automatically. Outlook users can also create server-side inbox rules directly from Ciela's Settings, so mail is handled by Microsoft before it even arrives in your inbox.
There's no update button yet — silent auto-updates are on the roadmap. For now, download the new version from the changelog and install it for your platform. Your data is stored separately from the app and is never touched during an update.