ClearBox: Open-Source Gmail Cleanup Dashboard powered by AI

Ask any developer to show you their personal Gmail inbox, and you will likely see a horror story: 14,000 unread emails.

Eighty percent of those are automated marketing blasts. Ten percent are cold outreach emails. Five percent are actual receipts. And somewhere, buried under a mountain of digital noise, is one message from an actual human being that needs a response.

Email was supposed to be a tool for communication. Instead, it became a massive, unsearchable storage drive for brands screaming for your attention.

We got tired of deleting emails one by one, so we built ClearBox. It’s an open-source, AI-powered Gmail cleanup dashboard built specifically for developers who want their inbox back. And because we respect your privacy, it runs locally.

What makes ClearBox Different?

There are dozens of inbox cleanup tools on the market. The problem is their business model. They require full read/write access to your entire email history, and then they charge you $10/month to use an algorithm to sort it. If you aren't paying, they are likely monetizing your purchasing data.

We went a different route.

ClearBox is an open-source Next.js application that you host yourself (or run locally on your laptop). It authenticates directly against your own Google Cloud project using the highly secure Gmail API.

No man-in-the-middle servers. No data harvesting.

The Core Features of an AI Inbox

When you link your Gmail account to ClearBox, the dashboard gives you a brutally honest assessment of your digital hoarding habits.

1. The Bulk Unsubscriber

The number one reason people have overwhelming inboxes is "promotional" newsletters they never intended to subscribe to. ClearBox scans the headers of your latest 5,000 emails, aggregates the most frequent senders, and provides a one-click bulk unsubscribe and delete button.

It doesn’t just move them to the trash. It actively finds the List-Unsubscribe header and nukes your subscription. We’ve seen users delete 10,000 marketing emails in under 60 seconds.

2. Finance & Receipt Extraction

For freelancers and small business owners, finding tax receipts in December is a nightmare. ClearBox has a dedicated financial filter that natively parses emails from Stripe, PayPal, Apple, and specific vendors.

It aggregates the total spend visually in the dashboard, letting you see exactly how much you paid Amazon or Vercel over the last 90 days. It turns your inbox into an actionable financial ledger.

3. Local AI Inbox Roasting with Ollama

This is the feature that makes ClearBox uniquely 2026.

We integrated ClearBox with Ollama, an open-source platform that lets you run Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on your own GPU. We feed anonymized metadata (sender volumes, subject line trends, unread counts) to a local AI model and ask it to analyze your email habits.

The result is the "AI Roast"—a brutally funny, personalized teardown of your digital life.

“You have 400 unread emails from LinkedIn. You know none of those people are actually offering you a job, right?”

Because the AI runs locally via Ollama, none of your actual email data is sent to OpenAI or Anthropic. It’s the perfect blend of cutting-edge AI insights without the privacy nightmare.

Deploying ClearBox

ClearBox is meant for developers. The setup takes about 10 minutes:

1. Clone the repository.
2. Create a free Google Cloud Console project and enable the Gmail API.
3. Drop your OAuth credentials into the .env.local file.
4. Run npm install and npm run dev.

That's it. You now have a hyper-secure, self-hosted, infinitely customizable email client running on your localhost.

We Need Your Contributions

ClearBox is in active development, and we want to expand it. We are looking for contributors to help build out Microsoft Outlook support, add more Ollama model prompt variants, and improve the React UI.

If you are a Next.js or React developer tired of your messy inbox, grab the code from our GitHub repository and check out the Open Source projects page. Fork it, run it, and let’s take back the inbox together.