It all started with 70K emails on my 10 year old email account. I wanted to clear it up and zoom in and visualize it to understand who are my senders, their details, their frequency etc.
I searched various solutions and all of them asked me to pay something then there is AI which asked me full access to my email to read all emails and content and it came with token cost too.
yes there is always a way of manually searching and cleaning it up. I wanted to have better spent for that time slot so I decided to use that time to solve it for everyone.
I built InboxPie - An OpenSource Free Email Analytics and Cleanup solution. I posted the first version in Reddit and the response was really good. Many inputs and feedbacks came from the comments
After three months of various attempts and coding hours and brain storming - I have just released the version 1.0.4 and this post is going to be about that
InboxPie extension is a local-first Thunderbird extension for visualizing and cleaning up your business email inbox.
It scans message metadata, turns the inbox into visual summaries, and lets you review selected messages before you can take the call to action to move them to Trash or another folder.
No Personal Data is collected or stored. It is a local-first extension that runs inside Thunderbird with no external service, API key, telemetry, or cloud upload.
Here is the demo of the application.
The extension is designed for people who want to answer questions like before they can take action.
- Which senders or domains create most of my mail?
- Which unread messages are old or noisy?
- Which messages take the most storage?
- What exactly am I about to move before I take action?
Features
- PieView — Interactive sunburst visualization by Year -> Month -> Domain. Click chart segments to drill down and hover for details. Sunburst legend is now clickable to add matching messages to your selection.
- By Sender — Rank senders by volume, expand a sender into years and months, then select specific groups for cleanup. Clicking a chart slice toggles selection for that sender directly.
- By Domain — Group messages by sender domain and expand each domain to inspect individual senders. Clicking a chart slice toggles selection for that domain directly.
- By Size — Find storage-heavy messages, senders, domains, and size buckets.
- Timeline — Explore message volume over time with range controls, zoom, month selection, and cleanup insight cards.
- Categories — User-defined message categories for organizing and filtering your inbox.
- Subscriptions — Manage subscription sources and view subscription-related messages.
- Contacts — Every unique sender as a searchable, A–Z indexed contact directory (name, email, domain, email count, last contacted). Export the list as CSV or JSON.
- Browse — A flat, searchable table of every scanned email with a checkbox on each row, virtually scrolled so it stays fast even across a full mailbox. Checking a row here behaves exactly like selecting from any other view.
- Settings — Customize extension behavior, theme preferences, and scan options.
- Selection engine — A shared selection follows you across every view. A floating pill in the bottom-right corner tracks the live count, bumps on change, and gives one-click access to Review or Reset.
- Review Selected — Before moving anything, review every selected message (no cap — virtually scrolled) in a checkbox-driven table with subject, sender, folder, account, date, and size. Search or sort, then use Exclude checked / Keep only checked to fine-tune, click a subject to open it in Thunderbird, or export the selection as CSV.
- Move to Trash / Move to Folder — Act on exactly what's checked, with a live in-modal progress ring so you can see the batch move happen in real time.
- Privacy Mode — Toggle email masking to hide emails and domains on-screen for screenshots, demos, or screen sharing (e.g.,
[email protected]→j***@l***.com). Exports always use real addresses. - Folder Selection — Choose exactly which folders and subfolders to scan from your real mailbox tree. Selection persists across sessions.
- Multi-account support — Scan all connected accounts or focus on one account.
- Local-first — Runs inside Thunderbird with no external service, API key, telemetry, or cloud upload.
Privacy
InboxPie processes mailbox information locally in Thunderbird.
- It does not send mailbox data to any server.
- It does not use analytics or telemetry.
- It does not read or display full email bodies.
- It uses message metadata needed for organization: sender, subject, date, folder, account, read status, tags, and size when Thunderbird exposes it.
- Selected messages are moved only after the user reviews and confirms the action.
Why should you believe this ? - that's why InboxPie is OpenSource and you can review the code yourself.
Permissions
| Permission | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
accountsRead |
List Thunderbird accounts and folders so the user can choose what to scan and where to move messages. |
messagesRead |
Read message metadata for charts, tables, search, review, and cleanup insights. |
messagesMove |
Move reviewed messages to a user-selected folder. |
messagesDelete |
Move reviewed messages to Trash. The extension does not permanently delete messages. |
Usage
- Click the InboxPie toolbar icon in Thunderbird.
- Choose an account or keep All Accounts selected.
- Click Scan Mailbox.
- Explore the views:
- PieView for a visual year/month/domain overview.
- By Sender to find and drill into noisy senders.
- By Domain to identify domains producing the most mail.
- By Size to recover mailbox storage.
- Timeline to review message volume and cleanup opportunities over time.
- Browse to search and check emails individually, with no aggregation in the way.
- Select rows, chart slices, or insight groups. A floating pill appears in the bottom-right corner showing your live selection count.
- Click the floating pill (or its Review button) to open Review Selected.
- Search or sort, check/uncheck individual messages, use Exclude checked / Keep only checked to fine-tune, click a subject to open it in Thunderbird, export to CSV if needed, then choose Move to Trash or Move to Folder — watch the live progress ring as it moves.
Privacy Mode: Click the eye icon in the header to toggle on-screen email and domain masking — useful for screenshots or screen sharing. CSV exports are never masked.
What Next
I am building InboxPie as a private Intelligence powered by Local Open Models and more updates would follow.
Cheers
Sarav AK
