Thank you to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. I’ve explained in the past what the service does, so this month, I thought I would talk about a typical day of using the service for one of my inboxes. For the same reason that the service works well for me, I think it could work well for you.
The inbox that I use for iPhone J.D. (jeff@iphonejd.com) receives lots of emails from lots of different sources. Many emails come from readers, and I always want to read those. Others have something to do with running this website or the podcast. Others come from vendors who want to tell me about a new product or service, and maybe 5% of those are of interest to me. Others are essentially spam emails that I never wanted to receive but they were not caught by the regular spam filter. And there are others too, but that gives you a sense of it.
SaneBox is a service that works in the background at the server level, and it acts like a traffic cop. Within seconds of an email arriving in my Inbox, SaneBox decides whether the email should stay in the Inbox, move to my @SaneNews subfolder (becuase it looks like a newsletter to which I subscribe), move to my @SaneLater folder (becuase it is of questionable importance, but still could be important), or move to another SaneBox folder such as @SaneAutoReplyiJD or @SaneBlackHole—more on those in a moment.
I try to check my Inbox every day, and whenever I do so, I typically see only a handful of new emails, and they are virtually all emails that I care about reading right away, such as emails from readers of iPhone J.D. I deal with them and then go back to my day. A few times a week, I look at the @SaneLater folder. Maybe two-thirds of the emails in there are either true spam or things like marketing emails from legitimate companies that just don’t happen to interest me. I can triage those very quickly. Then I read the emails in that subfolder that I care about. If the email happens to come from someone who matters to me, I drag the email from my subfolder back to my Inbox. The SaneBox service notices that I did that, and it interprets that as an instruction to keep future emails from that sender in the Inbox. After using SaneBox for many years, it has become increasingly rare for me to need to do this, but it still happens maybe once or twice a month.
When I have time to look at my newsletters—typically at night when I’m on my couch at home—I’ll look at the @SaneNews folder. I don’t subscribe to many newsletters, but I enjoy receiving them. However, I don’t want them clogging up my Inbox during the day when I need to get work done, so I love that they are moved to @SaneLater folder.
I pay for a service called FeedBlitz that sends out a free-to-you newsletter in the morning whenever there is a new post on iPhone J.D. If you want to sign up for that, just use the form on the right side of this website. The return address on those emails is my own email address, and I sometimes receive an out-of-office auto-reply from people who get that newsletter. For example, I received 14 of those emails this past Friday. The last thing that I would want is for those emails to clog up my Inbox, but thanks to SaneBox, that never happens. I created a rule on SaneBox that automatically moves those emails into a subfolder that I called @SaneAutoReplyiJD. It is pretty rare for me to have a need to look at those emails, but occasionally, someone asks me a question about getting those newsletters and I might find it useful to look at that subfolder. Otherwise, I just let them sit in there and delete them all once every few months.
If an email makes its way to my Inbox and I know that I never want to see an email from that recipient again, I move that email into the subfolder called @SaneBlackHole. Any future emails will go into that folder, and I never need to worry about that sender again. I take a quick look at that folder once every few months just to make sure that it is not making any mistakes, but in my many years of using SaneBox, I have yet to find a mistake.
There are other specialized features of SaneBox that I also use, but what I’ve described above is my core use of the service. Once a week, SaneBox sends me an email that tells me how much time I saved each week by using the service. My most recent one says that I saved 38 minutes last week. Who knows if that number is accurate, but it is definitely true that I was in and out of my Inbox far more quickly thanks to the traffic cop function performed by SaneBox. Those emails also contain useful tips for using SaneBox, and it is nice to be reminded of features that I might enjoy but haven’t explored in a while.
Because I work for a large law firm and I don’t have access rights to our mailserver, I cannot use SaneBox with my work email. But depending upon your work situation, you might be able to use it with yours. The SaneBox server never reads the contents of any emails, only things like the subject line and who it comes from, which is a nice privacy feature. However, I do use SaneBox with anoterh email account: my personal Gmail account. That works really well. Because I use my Gmail account when I purchase items online and have done so for decades, there are tons of emails that go to my Gmail account that I really don’t care about, and it is great that SaneBox keeps that Inbox tidy for me. SaneBox tells me that I saved 2.7 hours last week by using SaneBox with my Gmail account:
Although that statistic is too high—it’s not like I would have opened each of those irrelevant emails—it is undeniable that SaneBox did a great job of making that a far more useful email account. There is no question that I saved time using my Gmail account last week, and that is great.
If what I have just described sounds like something that would help you, click here to get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. 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.