What is Cleanbox and how does it work?
What is Cleanbox?
Cleanbox is an email management and protection platform that sits between the internet and your inbox. Every incoming email passes through multiple layers of analysis — spam scoring, virus scanning, sender reputation checks, authentication verification, and your own custom rules — before clean messages are delivered to your mailbox.
The result: less spam, fewer threats, and complete control over who can reach you.
The core principle: compartmentalization
Instead of handing out your real email address to every website, service, and newsletter, Cleanbox lets you create unique aliases that forward to your existing inbox. Each alias acts as a disposable layer of protection.
- Sign up for a newsletter → use a unique alias
- Register on an online store → use a different alias
- Share your contact with a new acquaintance → yet another alias
When an alias gets compromised or starts receiving unwanted mail, disable it with one click. Your real address was never exposed, so it stays clean and private.
Important: Cleanbox aliases are receive-only. You cannot send outbound email or reply through an alias.
How email processing works
Every message sent to one of your aliases passes through a multi-stage pipeline before it reaches your inbox:
- Spam detection — Powered by Rspamd, each message receives a spam score based on hundreds of rules, header analysis, and content inspection.
- Virus scanning — Attachments and message bodies are scanned for malware and known threats.
- Authentication checks — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are validated to confirm the sender’s identity.
- Sender reputation — A crowd-sourced reputation system tracks sender behaviour across the Cleanbox network.
- AI classification — An AI engine categorises messages into over 20 automatic contact categories, so your inbox is organised from the start.
- Bayesian learning — Cleanbox learns from your feedback. Mark something as spam or not-spam, and future filtering improves.
- User-defined rules — Filters with custom conditions and actions let you route, tag, or block messages exactly how you want.
For businesses: Relay
Cleanbox Relay is an inbound MX gateway designed for organisations. It filters all incoming email before forwarding clean messages to your mail server via SMTP. Your existing email addresses keep working — there’s nothing to change on your end. Relay adds the same multi-layer protection without requiring aliases or mailbox changes.
Key features at a glance
- Shield protection — Rate limiting, delivery scheduling, and a gatekeeper that holds suspicious messages for your approval.
- One-click unsubscribe — Instantly unsubscribe from newsletters without hunting for tiny links.
- Cloud storage — Store messages in the cloud with automatic attachment extraction.
- Team collaboration — Share aliases and contacts across a team with granular permissions.
- Automatic categorisation — 20 built-in contact categories keep your senders organised.
- Filters — Flexible conditions and actions to automate your email workflow.
Plans and pricing
Cleanbox offers five plans to fit every need:
- Free — $0/month
- Personal — $5/month
- Premium — $15/month
- Advanced — $35/month
- Enterprise — $100/month
Every plan includes the core protection pipeline. Higher tiers unlock more aliases, storage, team features, and advanced controls. Visit the pricing page for a full comparison.
