Sanebox – A Better Email Experience

September 23rd, 2013 § 37 comments

There is a worldwide epidemic happening, and I feel like someone finally needs to say something about the problem: email hoarding. We’re all guilty of it. It’s easy to rack up thousands of emails over the years. We can’t keep living in a world up to our eyeballs in mail, so what can we do about it? I decided to take the challenge head on and achieve Inbox Zero.

After searching around for a solution, I stumbled across SaneBox. It does what it implies: bring sanity to your inbox. It uses an algorithm to understand my past behavior and move less important emails out of my inbox and into a folder named SaneLater. If something’s in the wrong place, I just drag and drop it. That being said, it’s right almost 100% of the time.

It does way more than just filter though. As an entrepreneur, my favorite feature is SaneReminders. It lets me know when a contact hasn’t emailed me back, so I can be sure to follow up at the right time. It also has one click unsubscribe and snooze folders, which are an added bonus. Best, it works anywhere I check my email – phone, laptop, tablet, etc.

If you want to join me in the Inbox Zero revolution, you should definitely check out SaneBox.

§ 37 Responses to Sanebox – A Better Email Experience"

  • leiriope says:

    Why do you not divulge that there are costs associated with Sanebox? I only found out AFTER I gave the application access to my email. Pretty sketchy business. I’ll do without it, thanks.

    • Bostjan says:

      thanks for comment, I’m sorry for confusion, I assumed it’s clear enough – yes, they offer 2-week trial, and after that I found their pricing very reasonable since it solves a lot of my inbox problems.
      At the same time, I really appreciate that they explicitly promise they don’t scan the email content, but only recipients and subject lines, so I feel pretty safe…

    • It really is so difficult to hold your control down and just click on the 12 to 27 separate emails that you consider are junk and then press delete and enter to get rid of them. So much time saved each day. Busy busy.

  • Robert Harvey says:

    Threading is not something new. The first mail reader that I used in the early 80s had superb threading. It tied the child messages to the unique identifier on the parent message. This allowed subject lines to be modified so that a complex email conversation became a tree where each branch represented a single topic. This made the entire conversation far easier to follow, avoided linking unrelated messages and meant that there was no need to copy the entire thread to date into every response.

    My great frustration with Outlook is that Microsoft have failed to recognise that the subject line is a very poor link for threading. The best example of this is the single Outlook thread linking all messages with empty subject lines.

    • Philip King says:

      I haven’t tried Sanebox yet but I think I’ll give it a whirl. I’ll try anything once. I agree with you (Robert Harvey) concerning the weak threading of Outlook. MS failed there big time. It is hyper frustrating. BTW: I thought “Sane Mail” would have been a better name. It has pleasant assonance.

  • Oscar Rottink says:

    Early 80s? Really? I’m 40 but since I started early with things like fidonet, echomail via BBS’s I can’t imagine your kind of email has the slightest link with the email nowadays, besides it’s text. And about email, in the early 90’s (early as around 1995) there was so little email you were happy to get one and know others who could send you email.

  • Georges says:

    Aree the mails stored in a 2nd place, by Sanebox by example ?

  • Gry says:

    There’s no need for Sanebox if you know how to write a filter. But then, I’m so old that I miss pine …

  • kwaka750 says:

    geez, I thought the rules functionality did that in Outlook

  • rex says:

    Can the stored e-mail ‘subject lines and recipients” be double clicked to access the entire message (and threads)? Or, does the user have to return and dig these out?

    • Bostjan says:

      oh, no, you don’t need that – sanebox simply puts all the suspicious emails in a separate folder and emails you the list of them at the end of the day.

  • Hari says:

    Gmail already does it by allocating different tabs in the inbox (primary, social, promotion and updates). So I don’t see a reason why one should go for Sanebox unless you are not using Gmail

    • Bostjan says:

      don’t know for you, but for me gmail filters are not good enough – either they put too much or too little in those folders.

      and yes, majority of the world doesn’t use gmail.

    • Raabster says:

      Thank you for posting this! My first reaction was, “But my Gmail does this already, AND I don’t have to pay anything for it!”
      So I read through all the comments looking for another reasonable person.
      I have one glitch at work – the settings on our Outlook Pro account don’t allow for forwarding to another email address, so I have to process “work” email through Outlook…sigh! EVERYTHING else goes through my Gmail.

  • harry7738 says:

    Outlook solves all these problems.

  • gmail filters does the exact same thing for me already, what’s the point?

    • Bostjan says:

      it doesn’t. it’s not about filtering, but classifying senders.
      and most people don’t have gmail anyway.

  • Bethy says:

    Now it it could only do this same idea (filtering) with my Firefox bookmarks. My bookmarks are almost as bad as my emails.

  • stormchanter says:

    I definitely do not spend 28% of my time on email management. That would be as much of my time as I use up for sleep! Being on your email that much time must be a clinical condition of some kind, I’m sure the pharma industry will soon give it a name… 😉

    My snooze for email is the ‘mark as unread’ button. I have normal google filters moving a lot of email to various labels right off the bat.

    On the cost issue, I don’t mind paying for a software package, but I don’t rent software, I absolutely despise any company being able to nick my account on a monthly basis.

  • I use SaneBox and absolutely love it. I don’t know how the hell I managed to function without it. It’s like noise-cancelling headphones. Brilliant.

  • Sammy from Miami says:

    This all sounds like you’re getting a cut of the action Dude. Promoter eh? Everything is for the almighty dollar$! No fu-kin tanks!

  • Jorge Serrano says:

    Do you have a financial interest in recommending this mail service? Commission? Pay-per-click? Placement fee?

    • Bostjan says:

      great question!

      i do not have any financial interest in this blog post or recommending this mail service.

      i have been a very happy user for over a year now, and have received some discounts in the beginning for directly referring some friends, but this post is not part of that (or any other) promotional program, contains no tracking codes, they are not paying me anything for publishing or writing it.

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