Email has been around for so long that I honestly didn't think that there was much left to be done to improve the experience. Over the last few weeks, I learned that I was wrong. There is a way to make an email Inbox—and indeed, the whole email experience—vastly better by using a service called SaneBox. I've seen this service advertised for years, but I admit that I never really paid much attention to how useful it could be until the company reached out to me about a potential sponsorship of iPhone J.D. this month. That led me to try it out for myself. Now that I've started using SaneBox, I'm a convert. SaneBox is a transformative service that works with your existing email service to clean up your Inbox and add tons of new features. The end result is that you can be far more efficient and productive with your email, which is something that virtually everyone can appreciate.
In this post, I will start by explaining how SaneBox works, and then I'll discuss some of the key features of the service.
How SaneBox works
SaneBox works with any email service that provides IMAP, EWS - OWA, or Active Sync, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, iCloud, MS Exchange, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Amazon WorkMail, and others. I'm currently using it with my iPhone J.D. email account, which is just a normal IMAP account associated with a domain that I own. You may have an email account exactly like this one. My inbox receives a lot of emails from lots of different sources: people reaching out to me with questions or suggestions, companies that offer valuable and relevant services, newsletters that I signed up for, but also a lot of unwanted and/or junk email that is not caught by my spam filter.
SaneBox works by analyzing the headers of your emails. That means that SaneBox sees things like the subject line, date, and who the email is from. Your emails stay on your current email server; SaneBox never transfers your emails to its own server. And importantly, SaneBox never looks at the content of your email messages. Thus, any confidential information that is in your email never gets analyzed or acted upon by SaneBox. The only way that a SaneBox computer would see something confidential in an email message is if the confidential information was put in the subject line of the email, and even then, SaneBox only reads that information for the purpose of deciding whether and how to sort that email message.
You need to give SaneBox your email address and your email password so that it can see the headers. But the security of SaneBox has been audited by numerous security firms. The service has been around since 2010, a long track record that attests to its trustworthiness.
What SaneBox does
The main thing that SaneBox does is analyze the information in the headers of your emails and then filter messages based on that analysis. For any message that SaneBox thinks is likely a normal email that you would want, SaneBox leaves the email in your Inbox. For messages that SaneBox considers less useful, such as messages that may be junk, SaneBox moves those emails to a folder called @SaneLater. Messages that seem to be mailing lists are moved to a folder called @SaneNews. Messages that SaneBox knows that you don't want to see because you already told SaneBox (more on that below) are moved to @SaneBlackHole. And so on. I have more information on these specific folders below, but the end result is something like this: instead of going to your Inbox and seeing 17 new messages when only 3 of them are actually important, you see 5 new messages, including the 3 that are most important.
Thanks to SaneBox, I am much more efficient when I check email. I check my iPhone J.D. inbox from time to time during the day. Without SaneBox, if I pause what I am working on and see that I have over a dozen or more new messages, going through those emails becomes a chore. I need to take the time to separate the important emails from the others, and the whole process wastes time. With SaneBox, I instead glance at my Inbox and just see a few emails that are important. Based upon that, I can quickly decide if I need to read or act upon any of them or if I can get back to whatever else I was working on. Later on, when I know that I have more time to devote to email, I can pay attention to the emails that were moved into another folder such as @SaneLater. This vastly improves email efficiency.
Here is a deeper dive on the main SaneBox folders and other features. Note that you get to determine which of these folders and features you turn on and off, and you can typically adjust settings on each feature to fine-tune it. So for example, if you want to keep all newsletters in your Inbox instead of having them automatically moved to @SaneNews, just don't turn on the @SaneLater feature in your SaneBox dashboard.
@SaneBlackHole
My favorite SaneBox folder is @SaneBlackHole. When I get an email from someone who I don't want to get email from—maybe it is a spam message, maybe it is a marketing company that is of no interest to me, maybe it is a political candidate who I don't want to see literature from, etc.—I simply move it from my Inbox to the folder called @SaneBlackHole. This trains the folder. Future emails from that same person or company will automatically move to the @SaneBlackHole folder, stay in that folder for a week, and then get deleted.
Why not just click the unsubscribe button in the unwanted email? That's fine if you trust the company sending you the email that you don't want. But sometimes when you click an unsubscribe button, you are confirming to the sender that your email is an active one, and they will turn around and sell your email address to other companies, which results in even more unwanted email. When you move an email to the @SaneBlackHole folder, the person or company is not alerted that you did so.
What if you make a mistake? If you put something in the @SaneBlackHole folder by accident, simply move it back into your Inbox. SaneBox will see that you did that and learn that you don't want future emails from that sender to go into the @SaneBlackHole folder.
Is the @SaneBlackHole folder the same thing as a Spam folder or a Junk folder from your email provider? Not really. The end result is similar, but how it gets there is very different. Your own email provider provides a Spam folder feature that analyzes not only the sender and subject line but also the content of your email to determine if something is spam, phishing, a virus, etc. Spam folders are not perfect, but when they do work, they perform an important job by moving an unwanted email out of your Inbox. Even with SaneBox, you should continue to use the Spam folder feature provided by your own email provider. But as we all know, there are many messages not caught by a Spam folder even though you might want them to be. Perhaps your emial service cannot determine whether it is truly junk because for some types of messages, one person might want the message and another person may not. While you can often train the Spam folder provided by your email service provider, and you should do so, Spam folders are not always as smart as you want them to be. Thus, @SaneBlackHole works in a different way, along with your normal Spam or Junk feature, to provide a more customized filter. If you never want to hear from X again, just move one email from X into the @SaneBlackHole folder. And then you are done.
SaneBox describes the difference between a Spam folder and the @SaneBlackHole folder this way: "Keep in mind that @SaneBlackHole is not for SPAM. It is meant to be used for legitimate email from people or services that you don’t want to see or hear from anymore. Spammers go out of their way to make each email be sufficiently different so trainings like these don’t work."
For me, the @SaneBlackHole folder has worked extremely well. Every once in a while, I'll take a look at what is in that folder and see a huge number of emails that used to be going straight to my Inbox. I'm so thrilled to see that they went there instead and didn't waste my time.
@SaneNews
When SaneBox detects that you are receiving something that looks like a newsletter, it moves the message from your Inbox to the @SaneNews folder. This is nice because I receive many newsletters that I signed up for and want to receive, but I don't always want them to interrupt my workflow during the day by piling up in my Inbox. Whenever I'm ready to look at them, such as while I'm having lunch or at the end of the day, they are waiting for me in this folder.
Sometimes, I'll see something show up in @SaneNews that I did not sign up for and that I don't want to receive. I simply move that email into the @SaneBlackHole folder to train SaneBox to put similar emails there in the future.
On the other hand, sometimes I'll see something that is a newsletter but it is important to me so I'd rather keep it in my Inbox. For example, perhaps you love reading the free iPhone J.D. email that goes out whenever there is a new post. (You are not receiving the iPhone J.D. newsletter? Just click here or scan the QR code to the right to sign up.) Simply move the email with the newsletter out of @SaneNews and into your Inbox to teach SaneBox that it should keep that particular newsletter in your Inbox so that you will notice it more quickly.
It is nice that @SaneNews, like all SaneBox folders, is simply another folder in your email. This means that the fact that SaneBox has filtered the email doesn't mean that you don't have easy access to it. It's not like you need to go to the SaneBox website to view it or anything like that. Your current mail client, including the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, just sees @SaneNews as another folder. Your iPhone, iPad, computer, etc. doesn't need to know that it was the intelligence of SaneBox that moved the message into the @SaneNews folder or any other SaneBox folder, nor does your iPhone need to know that by moving a message from one folder to another folder, you are training the SaneBox service.
@SaneLater
The @SaneLater folder is a place where SaneBox puts emails that it considers likely to be less important, including messages that may be junk. If there is a type of email that you want to receive but typically don't want to act upon right away, move it from your Inbox to the @SaneLater folder to train SaneBox to move similar messages there in the future. You can always manually move a message from @SaneLater to your Inbox to train SaneBox that this is an important type of email that deserves to stay in your Inbox.
A lot of the emails that show up in my @SaneLater email are emails that I would consider spam or junk emails and that were not caught by my Spam filter. So I will often select a bunch of them and move them into the @SaneBlackHole folder so that in the future they will go straight there instead of in my @SaneLater folder. That system isn't perfect—the spammer may change up the "from" email address slightly to try to confuse SaneBox—but when I move a message into the @SaneBlackHole folder, at least I am trying to do something.
@SaneCC
If a message is sent to someone else but also sent to you as CC, you can have that message automatically go to a @SaneCC folder instead of your Inbox. I understand the idea here—since the email was not sent directly to you, it is potentially less important than other emails in your Inbox. I don't have this SaneBox folder turned on because so many of the emails that I receive as a cc are just as important as the ones for which I am in the "to" field. Nevertheless, I can understand how this may be valuable for many folks.
@SaneNoReplies
Have you ever sent someone an email asking for a response, but then they don't reply, and then you forget that you were waiting for a reply, and then you get annoyed at yourself for not following up sooner? The @SaneNoReplies folder is an optional folder aimed at addressing this situation.
Here's how it works. You send an email to someone. Just like always, your sent email goes into your Sent folder. But additionally, within a few minutes, SaneBox puts a copy of your sent email into the @SaneNoReplies folder. When someone replies to your email, the email that you sent is deleted from the @SaneNoReplies folder because it is no longer an email without a reply. The idea is that you can glance at your @SaneNoReplies folder from time to time to see the message to which there was no reply, and that can remind you to follow up and request a reply. If you see something in there that doesn't belong—perhaps you never expected a reply, or perhaps the other person replied in some other way like a phone call or a different email—just delete it from that folder and SaneBox will stop waiting for a reply.
Note that the @SaneNoReplies folder only acts upon emails where you sent the first email. If you are replying to an email chain, nothing that you send will go into this folder.
SaneReminders
What if you want to make sure that you get a reply within a specific time period, like three days? When you compose your email, add a bcc or a cc to 3days@sanebox.com. If three days have passed and you haven't yet received a response, then SaneBox will put a reminder email at the top of your Inbox. What if you want to get that reminder in three days regardless of whether you get a reply? Simply add the word "keep" such as keep.3days@sanebox.com.
Pretty much anything that you can think of will work for those SaneBox reminder addresses. There is a big list of them on this page. Examples include sunday@sanebox.com, november21@sanebox.com, dec.21.2pm@sanebox.com, etc.
SaneReminders works when you are sending a message and you use that special email as a cc or bcc. It also works if you receive an email and you want to deal with it at a later date: simply forward the email to a SaneBox reminder address such as friday@sanebox.com. On Friday, at the top of your inbox, you will see an email reminding you to act upon that email. (You can configure in the SaneBox settings what time of day those emails show up.) This is a good way to move an email out of your Inbox so that it doesn't bother you right now, but then have it come back when you will be ready to deal with it.
...and more
This post would get too long if I described every feature of SaneBox. There are lots of them. As I noted above, this service has been around for over a decade, so SaneBox has come up with lots of different features over those years. For example, you can schedule Do Not Disturb periods for your Inbox. You can create custom folders like @SaneReceipts or @SaneFamily and teach SaneBox how to move things into those folder for you. And you can do so much more.
Price
SaneBox has lots of different pricing tiers so that you can just pay for what you need, and you can try before you buy to get the service working and find out if it makes sense for you. It only takes minutes to set it up, and if you don't like the service, simply unsubscribe. And while you can pay month-to-month if you want, you can save substantially if you sign up for one year or two years.
If you only want to use two SaneBox features, you can choose the "Snack" tier which is $7/month or $59/year or $99 for two years. The most popular tier is the "Lunch" tier which can work with two email accounts and lets you choose six features for $12/month or $99/year or $169 for two years. (That's the tier that I paid for.) You can also get the "Dinner" tier which works with four email accounts and includes every feature for $36/month or $299 a year or $499 for two years. There are discounts for educational, non-profit, and governmental agencies.
Click here to sign up. That link includes an affiliate code that provides a small affiliate fee to iPhone J.D. if you decide to pay for a plan.
Conclusion
I'm so glad that SaneBox reached out to me about sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. It gave me an excuse to discover how the service works, and once you try it, it is immediately apparent how useful the service is. That's why it is nice to take advantage of a free trial of SaneBox. Better yet, as I've started to use some of the more advanced features over the past few weeks, I'm now getting even more out of SaneBox. I love the vast reduction in the size of my Inbox, which makes me much more efficient. I also love how SaneBox has helped me to get more out of my emails, with features like SaneNoReplies and SaneReminders. And perhaps best of all, there is something incredibly gratifying about moving an email into the @SaneBlackHole folder, knowing that I won't be bothered by a particular sender ever again. If you have never heard of SaneBox before, or if you are like me and you have heard about it but never took the time to pay much attention to it, I encourage you to check it out. I think that you will really like it.
Click here to try SaneBox.
