Sanebox Cleans my Inbox Like an OCD, Meth-Addicted Octopus
posted at 5:44 pm
on Apr. 10, 2012
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I get a lot of email. Not as many as the true technorati do, but more than you might guess. Actually, stop that, you don’t have to guess: It’s averaging 1,050 messages a week this year.
I’ve also gotten pretty good at handling (don’t say firehose, don’t say firehose) this firehose (d’oh!) of emails. Not perfectly, but I’ve got long experience on my side and a twitchly set of keyboard shortcuts.
So when I heard about Sanebox from Andru Edwards, I was frankly doubtful that it would do much for me that I wasn’t doing for myself. But it turns out.. well, I’m getting ahead of myself. What’s Sanebox, you ask?
Sanebox is a cloud-based service that offers to clean up your email inbox, like Dobby the house-elf, leaving just the important emails in your inbox, and sorting the rest away for your heirs to deal with. It’s supposed to save you “hours” a week.
The key questions are, how does it know what to pick, and how well does it do at picking?
How does it know what to pick? I have no idea. There’s NO setup initially. They just ask that if something seems misfiled, that you switch it back to where it belongs (i.e. put it back in your inbox, or kick it out to the “read later” box.) I get a lot of mail from random people who have never emailed me before. I’m on some mailing lists that are critical, and others that are lame. And I get email from generic-sounding addresses that are actually quite important. So I don’t know how it knows, because *I* don’t know how to tell it.
Then, how does it do? Frankly, I was stunned. Sanebox really did do an amazing job right off the bat. Since Sanebox, I probably only have to look at a third or a quarter as many emails when they arrive—it’s that’s wonderful.
Later when I have spare time, I look through the emails that have been moved to a “SaneLater” folder, which fills up with all those Facebook notifications and commercial emails and mailing lists that are too good to unsubscribe from but you don’t need to read right now. I can ignore it for a day or two or even longer. It’s heaven.
Sanebox also has a few other tricks it can do—it will scan your Spam folder to see if there’s anything mistakenly sent to there and rescue it, and it can hold items out of your inbox until tomorrow or next week and then drop them back in front of you. It also has more granular controls, but honestly, I like it BECAUSE it’s not granular—it just spins golden emails out of the pile of hay that used to be my inbox.
The only catch is, after the 30-day free trial, it costs some actual money: $5 / month. But since I get Gmail for free and I live in email, it’s a worthwhile investment for me. And perhaps, by supporting it, it’ll grow and either get bought by, or influence the development of, Gmail itself. Because even though I’ve already been using Gmail’s various tools (Priority Inbox) for getting me to my important email, Sanebox really does do a stellar job. It’s like the opposite of a spam filter.
And I also happen to like companies that actually CHARGE for something I VALUE. Compare this to Instagram which was free and then sold ITSELF and ALL MY PICTURES to Facebook. I’m not getting a penny of that.
You can try it for a month and then very easily discontinue it, and it’s not just for Gmail, it works with Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and more, they say. If you sign up for Sanebox via one of my links, I’ll get a $5 discount, and so will you. So there’s THAT carrot.
Really, I can think of only one downside—though it’s a BIG one. You see, Sanebox needs to have complete access to your inbox, so your privacy is in its hands (claws? gentle iron grip?) You’ve probably had to make this privacy choice several times in the past few years—deciding which companies you can bet your privacy on. Some companies have that “thing” that just makes me trust them (hi, USAA!), some don’t but have a service that’s worth the risk (hi, PayPal!) , and some are too sketchy, frivolous, scary or poorly implemented that I won’t go there (hi, Microsoft!).
Sanebox seems to me to be worth poking another hole in my ever-leaking privacy shield, but you may not think the same way.
If you get too much email and you want to see what a professional wrangler could do with it, give Sanebox a try, and let me know if you like it.
