Thank you to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. SaneBox is a service that works in the background at the server level, so you can keep using the Inbox in your current mail program the same way you always do. But thanks to SaneBox, your Inbox is suddenly much better. This is mainly because your Inbox shifts from being overpopulated with unimportant stuff to a short list of the most important messages. Thus, when you open your Inbox, you see only the good stuff that matters. But that is not all; SaneBox also gives you powerful features that make your email smarter.
SaneBox keeps your Inbox tidy by moving less important emails, such as newsletters, to subfolders. That way, you can deal with them when you have time, and it is often faster to handle these items because they are all together in a subfolder. Additionally, if you tell SaneBox that you never want to see email from a sender again, those go to the SaneBlackHole folder. It is so satisfying to move an item into the SaneBlackHole folder, knowing that I’ll never be interrupted by that sender again. (If I later change my mind, I can always just move an email out of SaneBlackHole and back into Inbox to train SaneBox that I now want those emails. But I think I’ve only done that once in my many years of using SaneBox.)
And that’s just the beginning. SaneBox also gives you lots of tools that you can (optionally) enable to make you more productive. For example, I love the SaneNoReply folder. It gives you an overview of all the emails you’ve sent—emails that you initiated—that haven’t yet received a reply. Sometimes, no reply is necessary. (If you don’t need a response, simply delete the email from SaneNoReplies, and SaneBox will stop tracking it.) But I often skim the emails in this folder, then see something I did need a reply to, and this SaneBox folder reminds me to follow up.
What if you know you need a reply by a certain date (or time)? SaneBox can help you when you use the SaneReminder feature. When you send the email, BCC an address that tells SaneBox when you need a response. For example, you can use “1.day@sanebox.com,” “2.weeks@sanebox.com,” or a day of the week such as “monday@sanbox.com” or “mon@sanbox.com.” If there’s no reply within that time period, the email will resurface in your Inbox for your attention.
Put it all together, and SaneBox makes your Inbox simpler and more powerful. All at the same time.
I’ve been paying for and using SaneBox for many years, and I find the service well worth it. For my iPhone J.D. emails, when I look at the Inbox, I can quickly focus on the messages that matter the most to me, such as a reader sending in a suggestion with a news story for my Friday In the News post or interactions with someone who matters to me. Every once in a while, I’ll check the SaneNews folder to see newsletters I subscribe to, or the SaneLater folder to see messages SaneBox thinks are less important, but those messages don’t crowd my Inbox.
SaneBox has been especially useful with my Gmail. I have used my Gmail account for many years for online purchases, so companies send me tons of emails. Before I started using SaneBox, my Gmail Inbox was always so full of unimportant emails that I sometimes missed the important ones. Now, I see only a few emails in my Gmail Inbox, and they’re the important ones. When I want to take time to look at less important emails, I check my SaneNews and SaneLater folder for newsletters and other less important emails. And of course, whenever I see an email from a company that I never want to hear from again, it goes to the SaneBlackHole folder.
If you want to try out SaneBox to see what a huge difference it can make in your life, click here to get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. If you don’t like having a clean, tidy Inbox and decide to go back to how you had it before, no sweat. But if you appreciate having a better way of working with email, using this link in this post will give you a generous $25 credit when you pick a plan—and there are lots of different plans offered so that you can choose the one that gives you just what you want.
Thanks again to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. and for giving all of us a more efficient way to work with email.