The Bottom Line
SaneBox does a great and helpful job separating the emails you need to see now from those you can consume at leisure, reserving your inbox for the former.
SaneBox works with any IMAP account (including Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and Exchange) and is pretty accurate, but its focus on senders instead of individual emails can lead to misplaced emails. A version to run on your own servers might be handy, too.
SaneBox works with any IMAP account (including Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and Exchange) and is pretty accurate, but its focus on senders instead of individual emails can lead to misplaced emails. A version to run on your own servers might be handy, too.
Pros
- SaneBox reduces your email inbox down to the most important emails
- Quite accurate, SaneBox is appropriately picky about what makes it to your inbox
- You can easily postpone emails with SaneBox, too, and get reminders about sent emails to which you received no reply
Cons
- SaneBox's focus on judging senders and not individual messages can have it misplace certain mail
- It would be swell if SaneBox could perform even more tasks (say, suggestions for replies) automatically
- SaneBox does not work locally and requires an IMAP or Exchange account
Description
- SaneBox identifies the important messages in your email inbox.
- All non-critical email is moved to a special folder ("@SaneLater"); with Gmail, SaneBox can also label it while leaving it in the inbox.
- SaneBox can classify with up to five categories: top, important, consume at leisure, newsletters, and transactional mail.
- You can keep things simple with only two categories — important or not —, of course, or add custom folders for training.
- Moving mail to special folders ("@SaneTomorrow" and "@SaneNextWeek", for instance) lets you defer emails for any time. SaneBox will return them to their folders when the time has come.
- For outgoing mail, a Bcc: copy to SaneBox sets up a reminder: if you do not get a reply within the (very flexibly, from minutes to years) specified time, SaneBox returns the original message to your inbox.
- SaneBox lets you set up reminders not connected to to sent emails — triggered just by time — as well.
- You can train SaneBox by moving emails to the desired folder; moving to "@SaneBlackHole" creates a filter to ignore a sender.
- SaneBox can monitor your email account's spam folder for important messages.
- Connecting to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter lets SaneBox learn about people you know through these social networks.
- A motivating weekly (or monthly) report gives a graphical account of what kind of mail you got, and how you dealt with it.
- SaneBox supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, iCloud, AIM and AOL Mail, Exchange and any IMAP or WebDAV email account.
