Distinguish the address from the app
Write the address in your own private notes, then identify where its messages are stored. The icon you tap may belong to an application rather than the provider. Do not paste the address or message contents into our tools. A useful inventory can simply say personal account A, its provider, and the desktop or mobile applications that show it. That is enough to start identifying the layers involved.
List the existing participants
Include webmail, desktop mail, phone mail and any service that already sorts or removes messages. Ask what each one does automatically. If you do not know, mark it unknown rather than assuming there are no rules. Two services acting on the same group can make the result difficult to diagnose. The aim is a readable map, not a technical record of every setting in the account.
Check ownership and compatibility
A personally owned mailbox and an employer-managed account require different decisions about third-party access. Clean Email’s provider documentation is a starting point for compatibility, not permission from an organization. Check the exact account and current connection instructions. Do not disable security protections or generate credentials merely to get past an unexplained failure. A blocked connection may be a legitimate policy boundary rather than a product defect.
Produce a useful handoff
Your finished inventory should answer four questions: which mailbox changes, who authorizes changes, what already acts on mail and where results will be verified. For a fictional family account, those answers might be a personal provider account, its owner, a phone app plus one native filter, and provider webmail. Keep unresolved questions visible. Start the pilot only after the owner understands the proposed action and its scope.
Sources used for this page
These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.
- Clean Email: supported providers — Merchant documentation · clean.email · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-26
- Clean Email: getting started — Merchant documentation · clean.email · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-26