How Prune handles your inboxes
A plain-language walkthrough of what happens from the moment you connect an inbox to the moment you disconnect — without the inner workings.
Connecting an inbox
You connect Gmail or Outlook through your provider’s secure authorization. You see and approve the permissions before anything is connected, and you can disconnect at any time.
Initial analysis and synchronization
Prune reviews your inbox to understand the senders and patterns within it, then keeps that view current. This is what makes sender-level cleanup possible.
Sender-level cleanup
Instead of asking you to process messages one by one, Prune groups them by the senders behind them, so a single decision can clear many messages at once.
People and important communication
Prune helps keep the people and conversations that matter visible, separating genuine human communication from automated noise.
Recommendations
Prune suggests actions — such as archive, unsubscribe, or keep — based on communication patterns and sender activity. Recommendations are suggestions, not guarantees.
User confirmation
You decide what happens. High-impact actions are presented for your review and approval according to your settings.
Archive, Trash, delete, and unsubscribe
These are distinct actions with different effects. Archiving moves messages out of the inbox; Trash and delete remove them subject to your provider’s rules; unsubscribe acts on a sender’s unsubscribe option where available.
Undo and recovery
Where your email provider supports it, recent actions can be reviewed and reversed. Recoverability ultimately depends on the provider’s own retention rules.
Multiple inboxes
You can connect more than one inbox and manage them together, while keeping each account’s context distinct.
Suggestions versus confirmed information
Prune distinguishes what it has detected from what you have confirmed. Detected information is presented with controls so it isn’t treated as fact on its own.
AI-assisted features
Some features use automated processing to help organize and summarize. You can learn what these features use, and where applicable, turn them off. Details are described in the Privacy Policy.
User controls
You can adjust settings, dismiss suggestions, exclude senders, correct your own notes, and decide how much Prune does automatically versus on approval.
Disconnecting Prune
You can disconnect an inbox in Prune and revoke access with your provider at any time. See Data and account deletion for what each step affects.
Prune analyzes communication patterns and sender activity to provide recommendations. We don't publish the precise logic behind those recommendations, but we do explain what they're based on and keep you in control of what happens next.