Most of your mailbox can go.

Archive draws your mailbox the way a geologist draws the ground: one band for each year, newest on top. The more email a year brought, the thicker its band.

• The light line on top of a band is what real people wrote to you. It stays. Archive doesn’t touch it.
• Grey is what can go. The lighter the grey, the busier that year was.
• A red line is email we are not sure about. We never throw those away. You decide.
• Beside each band, twelve squares: one for each month. Lighter squares mean more email.

Press After, and the grey drains away. What is left is what stays.

Why they can go

• Newsletters
• Sent to lots of people
• The same email again and again
• Sent by a machine

1. Connect

   Add your mailbox with an app password, a separate password your email service makes for apps like Archive. Gmail, iCloud Mail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Yandex and any other email server that speaks IMAP all work. Outlook and Hotmail need Microsoft’s own sign-in, which isn’t ready yet.

2. Archive looks

   It reads who each email is from, who it went to, its date and its subject, straight from your email server to your iPhone. It fetches an email’s first lines only while that email is on screen, and the whole email only when you open it. Nothing is marked as read.

3. You decide

   Archive asks you about the emails it isn’t sure of, and each answer counts for old and new emails. Emails from people, password emails and things you wrote are always your choice. When you are ready, press and hold, and the emails move to your email service’s own trash. Archive never deletes anything for good: Gmail and iCloud Mail keep the trash for 30 days, Yahoo Mail for 7, and other services until they empty it.

• People

  Everyone you wrote back and forth with, one line each, from your first email together to your last. Touch a line to see who it is.

• Senders

  Every sender in one list, with how many emails each one sent, and how much of your mailbox the top six sent.

• On this day

  An email you and someone swapped on this day, years ago.

• Archive connects straight to your email server over an encrypted connection. No server of ours sits in between.
• No account and no ads. Archive sends us nothing about how you use it.
• Your app password is kept in your iPhone’s keychain, on this device only.
• We only look. We change nothing unless you say so.

Read the privacy policy

• Looking costs nothing, ever.
• The first 100 emails you move from each mailbox are free.
• After that, pay once, and that mailbox is yours to clean for good. There is no subscription.
• The purchase belongs to the mailbox. On your next iPhone, with the same Apple Account, it opens that mailbox again.
• The App Store shows the price before you pay.