Alternatives
Clean Email,
beside Brood.
If you use Clean Email, or are choosing between it and Brood, this page sets out what Clean Email reads, from its own pages, beside what Brood reads. Each line about Clean Email links to the page it comes from, with the day we read it.
What each reads.
How it reaches your Gmail
Clean Email
Gmail access through Google; the pages we read name no scopes. From Clean Email, Privacy policy, read 9 October 2026.
Brood
- Email metadata: sender, recipients, date, existing labels
- Permission to create and modify labels in your Gmail
- Permission to create and modify Gmail filters
What it reads
Clean Email
Message metadata and headers; its features act on the subject line. From Clean Email, Privacy policy, read 9 October 2026; Clean Email, Features, read 9 October 2026.
Brood
It never reads:
- The subject line of any message
- The body of any message
- Attachments of any kind
- Anything you've drafted but not sent
- Anything in Drive, Calendar, Meet, or Contacts
- Anything we'd use to train a model
Whether your mail goes to a model
Clean Email
None named in its privacy policy. From Clean Email, Privacy policy, read 9 October 2026.
Brood
Brood decides what to propose by rules and counts you can read, and never sends your data to a model, its own or anyone else's. If you point an assistant of your own at what Brood has learned, that is your assistant, reading your record, because you asked.
The permission that lets Brood file your mail also lets it read your mail. Google does not offer a narrower one that can label a message you have already received. Brood never uses it to read. Every request it makes asks for metadata only, through one module, and the subject line is not among the headers it asks for, so it never arrives at all. So the promise is that Brood never reads what your mail says, not that it can't.
Moving over to Brood.
On the Classifications page, Show my own filters lists every filter in your Gmail that Brood did not write, with who it names and what it does, and Brood keeps nothing of them. On Pro, Brood can take over one that names a single sender and files that sender's mail under one of your labels, out of the inbox.