Review: SaneBox – Stop Drowning in Email!
Your email
is one of the most necessary yet frustrating parts of your work life. It’s okay to admit it, you’re not alone in this boat.
Regardless of whether you are an employee, a business owner, or a solopreneur, email remains the primary method of interaction in modern business. Add to that your personal emails, forums, newsletters, and the occasional spam mail that makes it through your Gmail filters, and managing your inbox becomes a time-sucking endeavor.
Numerous books, methods, and software programs have been dedicated to solving this problem, and none are perfect, but SaneBox may be the closest thing to the perfect solution that there is.
What Is SaneBox?
is a ridiculously simple yet extremely effective filtering system for your email inbox which works for almost any major email system, including Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo and more. Instead of numerous folders for every conceivable client or subject (which sometimes makes things just as difficult), SaneBox keeps things simple. In it’s simplicity, it transforms your inbox powerfully.
How Does It Work?
SaneBox not only works simply (and simply works) after it’s installed and slightly trained, but the setup is just as simple. You simply enter your email address and go through the standard email confirmation ritual, and boom. You’re pretty much done.
After SaneBox is installed, you just have to pick which folders you want to use. There are two categories of folders, described as “folders you read” and “folders you use”. The “read” folders are automatically sorted collections of similar emails like news, bulk, and so forth, while the “use” folders include handy things like reminder functions and @SaneBlackHole, which I’ll discuss shortly.
By default, only your inbox and @SaneLater are active. This is the simplest division of “more important” and “less important”. As you add other folders, up to 5 layers of importance can be applied to your mail, depending on your needs.
The only thing left to do (other than figure out how best to spend your newfound extra time) is to train the program with an occasional tweak. In other words, if an email is placed in the @SaneLater folder but should have been in the Inbox, you simply drag the email to the other folder and SaneBox will remember these actions and adjust accordingly.
If you are thinking that this is an unnecessary program because of Gmail’s built-in features like Priority Inbox and recently released Tabbed Inbox, then you are only partially correct, and it’s a small part. As explained on their , the difference is that SaneBox works. I use Gmail myself (and honestly I think that the combination of Gmail’s features and SaneBox is the best thing since sliced bread), and although it does a fairly good job of sorting things, it still misses some things repeatedly and weirdly. SaneBox does it right, every time. I suppose they just have better algorithms, but whatever the reason – it works.
The “read” folders are (each one begins with @Sane…) Later, News, Bulk, Archive, Top (like Gmail’s Priority Inbox) Top2Box (helps to correct between Top and Inbox), NotSpam (non-spam emails rescued from the spam folder), or you can make custom folders with your own rules.
The “defer” folders include @SaneBlackHole (drag to this folder to never see these types of emails again), @SaneTomorrow (hides the email and sends it back to your inbox the next day), @SaneNextWeek (hides and sends email to your inbox on the next Monday), and custom folders.
@SaneReminders is another useful angle in this software. Forwarding a mail to tomorrow. will put the email back in your inbox the following morning at 9am. You can also send to tuesday.5pm@…, 3days@…, oct.31-11.55am@…, and so forth. The most common use for these reminders is to see if the recipient opened the mail. If you CC or BCC the “date and time”@sanebox.com and the recipient doesn’t open the email by that time/date, you will get the email back in your inbox. If they open it, you don’t see it again.
SaneBox can also link to your Dropbox or Box account for attachment file storage. With this enabled, you can choose to have attachments from emails sent to a specific folder in your DropBox/Box account and a link added to the email heading. You can also choose whether the original attachment is deleted immediately from the email account or after a certain period of time. You can also customize the backup to apply to only certain types and/or sizes of attachments.
Sanebox can also connect to your
if you like, which helps to improve its accuracy even more by learning more about your friends and your patterns with their emails.
There are three pricing levels and you get a two week free trial (no credit card required!). The “snack” level is $6 monthly or $48.96 for a 2 yr subscription, and it includes 1 email account, 5 reminders monthly, 5 attachment stores monthly, and 1 additional folder (beyond the standard @SaneLater, @Sane Archive, and social integration). The “lunch” level is $15 monthly or $138.96 for a 2 yr subscription. It includes 2 email accounts, 250 reminders, 250 attachments, and 5 additional folders. “Dinner” is $50 monthly or $468.96 for 2 years. It includes 3 email accounts, unlimited reminders and attachments, and 9 additional folders. Referring a friend gets you both a $5 credit.
Things We Loved
@SaneBlackHole. Everything about this program is great, but this feature is my favorite. Some of us sign up for too many things with the good intention of actually reading the newsletters, and unsubscribing is a pain. Drag an email to this folder, and you’ll never see another one from them again. That simple. Love it.
function is amazingly versatile, and its use in checking for opened mail on the recipients end is brilliant.
It really works well. Not only in its functionality but in its purpose. It has taken much of my email burden away, and it did it quickly with practically zero learning curve or time invested.
You receive a daily summary of emails to make sure that you haven’t missed one because of not checking a certain folder, and the opportunity to train those emails right then. This is nice as you get used to a new system to make sure you don’t miss anything important.
Things We’d Love to See in the Future
It’s hard to find much that hasn’t been thought of with SaneBox when it comes to inbox management. The one feature I would like to see is integration with Evernote, but that’s really unnecessary with the Evernote web clipper and
Chrome features.
The price could be a bit more affordable for the everyday emailer. For a professional solution (and their target market is professionals) it is completely reasonable, but full functionality is a little pricey for someone who isn’t writing it off their taxes.
Who is SaneBox for?
I know I seem to end a lot of reviews this way, but SaneBox is for practically everybody, but the most grateful users will be those who are professionals and use email extensively. If you don’t use email that much then you are the exception, but I know very few people who fall into that category.
If you are like the rest of us whose business lives and dies with email, then you should . With their 2 week free trial that doesn’t require signing up with a credit card and then cancelling if you don’t love it (every other company out there should take note), there is absolutely no reason not to. I can almost guarantee you’ll love it, though.
Wally Peterson is a freelance writer and aspiring beach bum with a face made for blogging. He lives 60 seconds from the sand (walking time) on the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.
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is a smart email filter that brings sanity back to your inbox by prioritizing what’s important, removing spam & junk, grouping newsletters together, and automating tedious tasks.
It moves unimportant emails from the inbox into a new folder and summarizes them in a digest, where you can quickly bulk-process them. An average
customer saves 12+ hours/month.
With glowing reviews from TechCrunch, Forbes, The New York Times and emailers everywhere, you can rest assured that you will fall in love with email again. And it’s risk free—cancel and your email returns to the way it was.
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Incredible features that make email work again. Great customizations. Easy to use.
Service itself generates a few emails, which might feel counter-intuitive.
Bottom Line
SaneBox is the best thing that has happened to email. It turns your inbox back into the inbox it was meant to be by weeding out unimportant messages. With additional features to snooze emails, track when people don't reply, and more, it's an Editors' Choice.
How many unread messages are in your inbox? How many of them are unimportant, or if they were important, they certainly aren't anymore? An email service called SaneBox solves this very problem, and it does so with amazing accuracy. SaneBox works with your existing email service, so you don't have to install any new apps or learn a new interface. It goes into your email on the back end and figures out what's important and what's not, moving everything in the latter group to a folder that you can check on periodically. It is easily among the
I've ever used. SaneBox is the best thing that has happened to email since email's invention. It's a five-star service, a PCMag Editors' Choice, and one I personally recommend to busy professionals over and over again.
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Pricing SaneBox uses a subscription model to charge for its services. You can pay monthly, annually, or every two years, getting a discount of up to 40 percent for paying in advance.
There are three tiers of service rather adorably called Snack, Lunch, and Dinner. There's also a tier of service for businesses called &(contact the company for more details).
SaneBox Snack costs $7 per month, $59 per year, or $99 for two years. With Snack, you get Priority Filtering (the main attraction to the service), SaneNoReplies, SaneConnect, ten SaneReminders per month, ten SaneAttachments per month, and your choice of one additional feature. I give an overview of what all those features are and how they work in the next section.
SaneBox Lunch costs $12 per month, $99 per year, or $169 for two years. It includes Priority Filtering, SaneNoReplies, SaneConnect, 250 SaneReminders per month, 250 SaneAttachments per month, and five additional features of your choice.
SaneBox Dinner costs $36 per month, $299 per year, or $499 for two years. It includes all the features that the company offers, plus unlimited SaneReminders and unlimited SaneAttachments. For most people, this level of service is overkill, though you can certainly try the service for 14 days and see for yourself how many features you actually use.
Once you start using SaneBox, it monitors your use and it recommends the tier of service that's right for you.
Setup and Security To use SaneBox, all you have to do is enter your email address on SaneBox.com, and then enter your email password when prompted&not a new password, but your email password. You're authorizing SaneBox access to go into your email. As for whether this information is kept secure once you hand it over, the company says, "your credentials are encrypted with proven public key cryptography, and placed on a server that's unreachable by public Internet." Your messages never leave your email server. I recommend reading more about
to make sure you're comfortable with what it does and how it works.
One message I've really taken to heart from SaneBox is that the service is not free because when services are free, you're often the product being sold.
How SaneBox Works SaneBox works for Web mail (such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, etc.) as well as accounts hosted on IMAP and Exchange servers. Only POP accounts are not supported. There's nothing to download or install. The free trial doesn't require a credit card.
A short time after signing up, you receive a message explaining what changes SaneBox has made to your email, which amounts to creating a new folder called @SaneLater where it automatically puts any incoming messages that are likely to be unimportant to you. These probably will include messages from email addresses with whom you have never corresponded before (cold emails). All your other messages stay in your inbox like normal.
SaneBox's secret sauce is in the algorithm it uses to sort mail, the feature it calls Priority Filtering. It's impossible to know for sure exactly how it decides whether a message is important or not. But seriously, it works. The company says it doesn't look at the contents, but only the header and metadata. I'm sure it's taking into consideration your email history to see if you've corresponded with someone from a particular domain before, and I'd put good money on SaneBox detecting whether your name was typed in the "To" field or whether it's been auto-filled by an email marketing service. I'm sure there's a lot of information SaneBox parses. But the important thing to know is that the more you use SaneBox, the smarter it gets.
Plenty of instructions sent via email to you and on the SaneBox website teach you how to train SaneBox, although it amounts to dragging important emails out of the @SaneLater folder and into the inbox. Tada! It's really that easy, although you can get much more advanced with SaneBox if you want.
Periodically, SaneBox will send you an email that has a list of the messages that went into the @SaneLater folder. This email is interactive, and you can click on a button next to each email listed in the message to have it sent to your inbox instead. There are a&handful of other emails you'll get from SaneBox, which in itself feels counterintuitive to the point of the service, but in the end, they are&useful.&
Additional Features As mentioned, different tiers of service come with additional features, which I'll explain here.
SaneNoReplies. The SaneNoReplies feature is a folder that helps you stay on top of people who have not replied to your message. When you send messages and the recipients don't reply, your sent emails will be stored in this folder until they do.
SaneReminders. Related to SaneNoReplies is SaneReminder, which will remind you by a time that you specify to follow up with your email recipient if she or he hasn't do so already. To use the feature, all you have to do is add to the CC or BBC field "," or whatever time frame suits you.
SaneAttachments. SaneBox can connect to online storage services, such as
or . When you turn on the SaneAttachments feature, SaneBox will automatically save any attachments that come through your email account. SaneAttachments has good customization options, too, that let you save the attachments exactly where you want. In email, it replaces the attachment with a link to that document on the cloud storage space.
SaneConnect. This feature is restricted to organizations that have SaneBox for Business, but it's particularly useful in particular industries. It allows you to search any domain name to find colleagues who have relationships at the company, and then request an introduction, similar to what you might do on LinkedIn, only with SaneBox, you never have to leave your email program to get it done.
There are more features, too, such as being able to give an assistant access to your SaneLater contents, and snoozing emails so they disappear from your inbox until a time of your choosing. If you give SaneBox your login for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it will scour your networks for email addresses and make sure none of your friends or business acquaintances get knocked into the @SaneLater folder. How freaking smart is that? There's really a lot to explore. You can read more about the
The Personal Experience I like to have tight control over my email. I customize settings. I create filters. I use a rigid folder system for archiving messages.
Even though I enjoy having hands-on control of my email, a week into using SaneBox for the third time (I've tested it a few times previously), I am completely enamoured with the service all over again.
As a writer with a public-facing email address, I get a lot of unsolicited mail. I delete roughly 60 percent of the messages I receive without ever opening them. With SaneBox, all those emails are now automatically put into a separate folder. My inbox is an inbox again, a place for important work that I actually process. The @SaneLater folder hangs onto everything else, just in case, until I scan and dump it.
Pure Sanity I occasionally give talks about email management to different groups. Through the years, I've learned about unique email challenges of government employees, people in higher ed, communications professionals, students, talent agents, and others. Every time, I end up including SaneBox in my list of recommended tools. SaneBox doesn't just solve a few email problems for a few people. It gets at the heart of what's wrong with email for everyone.
SaneBox works effectively without creating confusion about what it's doing to your inbox, and provides a long list of controls, settings, and features that give you even more tools for making your email experience better and more efficient. SaneBox makes email better, and for that, it's a PCMag Editors' Choice. I highly recommend it.
outstanding
Bottom Line: SaneBox is the best thing that has happened to email. It turns your inbox back into the inbox it was meant to be by weeding out unimportant messages. With additional features to snooze emails, track when people don't reply, and more, it's an Editors' Choice.
About the Author
Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma...
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