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 continue to use your Inbox of your current Mail program the same way that you have always done. But your Inbox is suddenly much better. Primarily, this is because your Inbox changes from being overpopulated with lots of unimportant stuff into a short list of the most important messages. Thus, when you open your Inbox, you essentially see just the good stuff that matters. But SaneBox also gives you powerful features so that your email is more helpful.
SaneBox keeps your Inbox tidy because less important emails, such as newsletters, are moved to subfolders so that you can deal with them when you have time, and it is often faster to deal with all of those at once. And if you tell SaneBox that there is an email sender from which you never want to see email again, those go to the SaneBlackHole folder.
But 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 and then see that there is something for which I did need a reply, and so this SaneBox folder reminds me to follow up.
What if you know that you need to get a reply by a certain date (or time)? SaneBox can help you when you use the SaneReminder feature. When you send the email, send a BCC to an address that tells SaneBox when you need a response by. For example, you can use “1.day@sanebox.com” or “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 all of this together and SaneBox makes your Inbox both more simple and more powerful. All at the same time.
I’ve been paying for and using SaneBox for over two 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 look in the SaneNews folder to see newsletters that I subscribe to or the SaneLater folder to see messages that SaneBox thinks are less important, but I don’t see all of those messages crowding up my Inbox.
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 and tidy Inbox and decide to return 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 for 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. this month and for giving all of us a more efficient way to work with email.