Thank you to Sanebox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. In previous posts, I’ve discussed how SaneBox vastly improves an inbox by letting you see just the good stuff. This month, however, I want to focus on security.
Cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated every day, sending you emails that seem legitimate in the hopes that you will click a link and be tricked into providing personal information and/or a login password. Every email service includes a spam filter that analyzes message content and attempts to block malicious emails. While you should take advantage of these filters, unfortunately, they are never enough. The bad actors can take advantage of AI to draft emails that, at first blush, may seem entirely legitimate.
That’s where SaneBox can help. For privacy reasons, SaneBox never looks at the content of any of your emails. (Which, by the way, I consider a great feature.) Instead, SaneBox examines the sender and subject lines of your messages. It intelligently keeps the emails you are most likely to want in your inbox, while moving less important messages to folders such as @SaneLater. This makes a huge difference. It means that when I’m working with my inbox throughout the day, there are relatively few emails in there. About once a day, I review the messages SaneBox has placed in the @SaneLater folder. When I do, I naturally adopt a more critical mindset, evaluating whether each email is important to me. Some of these messages are legitimate, but others are either spam that slipped past the spam filter or emails that simply do not deserve my attention. Or, they are emails that are improperly trying to attract my attention, something sent by a malicious actor. That is because typical phishing emails are sent by someone unknown to me, so there is a high chance that they are automatically sorted by SaneBox into my @SaneLater folder, not my regular inbox.
Another risk is known as spearphishing: an email that comes specifically to me, perhaps from the email of someone I do know, because that person’s email was compromised. But here again, SaneBox helps. Those rare emails may end up in my Inbox, but because SaneBox vastly limits the number of emails in my Inbox, each of them gets more of my attention, making it easier for me to spot something that isn’t quite right.
When I see an unwanted email from a sender that I don’t want to deal with again, I don’t bother using something like an “unsubscribe” link in an email. I rarely trust those to work—especially if the email came from a less reputable source. In fact, some companies may use your click to confirm your email address is valid, allowing them to sell your email address to others for misuse. Ugh. Instead, I just move the email into my @SaneBlackHole folder. With that one move, SaneBox will forever move all emails from that sender into that folder. They can send me as many annoying emails as they want in the future; I don’t care, because I never see them. It is awesome.
The primary reason I have subscribed to SaneBox for so long is that it provides a superior inbox experience. But I also very much appreciate that it enhances my email security—an increasingly important benefit.
If you would like to experience the difference SaneBox can make, 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 that is even more secure and decide to return 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 better and safer way to work with email.