How many of the emails in your inbox are actual messages from humans that need your attention? Half? A quarter? SaneBox reclaims your inbox by sorting messages before they get there. The tool works with your existing email service, so you don't even have to install any new apps or learn a new interface. It's among the top productivity apps we've ever reviewed.
SaneBox goes into your email on the back end and figures out what's important and what's not, moving everything in the latter group to a folder that you can check periodically. Or, if you prefer, you can set it up so that certain emails go into certain folders—it's all up to you. SaneBox is the best thing that has happened to email since its invention. It's a rare five-star service and a PCMag Editors' Choice winner, one we recommend to busy professionals over and over again.
How Much Does SaneBox Cost?
There is no free version of SaneBox, but there is a two-week free trial. SaneBox's literature regularly points out that the service is not free because when services are free, you're the product. It's refreshing to hear that message from a company put so simply.
The paid plans are named after meals and priced based on the number of accounts supported and the number of features you can use; you choose which features you want during the sign-up process and can change them anytime. Two examples of features (both of which I describe later) are Reminders and Attachments.
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In any event, you can pay monthly, annually, or every two years, getting a discount of up to 40% for paying in advance. We'll discuss annual rates, for the sake of comparing prices with other services.
The cheapest SaneBox plan is Appetizer ($24 per year), which lets you use one feature on a single email account. The next plan, Snack ($59 per year), offers two features on a single email account. After that comes Lunch ($99 per year), which supports two email accounts with six features for each. The ultimate package, Dinner ($299 per year), lets you use all features on up to four email accounts.
SaneBox gives plenty of value for its features compared with the competition. The easiest application to compare SaneBox with is InMoat, which, unlike SaneBox, offers a free version that's limited to 500 emails per month. The paid plan of InMoat starts at $108 per year, though, meaning it's more expensive than all SaneBox plans except Dinner. It's worth noting that SaneBox offers far more features at that price than InMoat, which only offers email filtering. Unless you use the free version of InMoat, SaneBox is the better deal.
Some email clients have filtering similar to SaneBox built in. Spark, for example, is an email client that bundles newsletters and other distractions to get them out of the way. It starts at $59.99 per year, and among email clients, it's an Editors' Choice pick. Superhuman also offers similar features, though, at $360 per year, it's likely too expensive for most people.
Which Platforms Does SaneBox Run On?
SaneBox, once set up, runs in the background. You just keep using your email the same way you did before. You can connect SaneBox to almost any email address: Gmail, Exchange, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail are all directly supported, and you can add any other email account that supports IMAP.
SaneBox is primarily configured in your web browser so you can use it pretty much everywhere, though there's also an iOS app you can use. There is no Android app for configuring SaneBox.
Getting Started With SaneBox
To use SaneBox, you go to the website and add your email address to authenticate the service. Google and Yahoo users can log in using their accounts. Everyone else must enter their email address and follow the steps to log in. I tested SaneBox using both a Gmail account and an IMAP account. Connecting was easy in both cases.
After signing up, the service asks you which folders you want to enable. This is the core of what SaneBox does: create folders to which unimportant messages are automatically sent. The default folder, called @SaneLater, includes any emails that are likely to be unimportant to you. You can enable other folders, such as @SaneNews, for newsletters; or SaneCC, for all emails on which you were CC'd. Choose the features you want to enable, then use your email as you usually do.
Banish the Unimportant
SaneBox's secret sauce is in the algorithm it uses to sort mail, the feature it calls Priority Filtering. It's impossible to know for sure exactly how it decides whether a message is important or not. But it works. And you can customize it. Dragging messages from your Inbox to one of the SaneBox folders, and vice versa, trains the algorithm to move future messages that are similar to the same place.
As I said, once you set up SaneBox, you can use your email as usual. The only difference is that unimportant emails automatically end up in those new folders you let SaneBox create. You can review the messages in them manually whenever you like, although SaneBox also sends you a daily reminder email to check those folders. It's ironic that an app designed to reduce email clutter sends you reminder emails, granted, but some might appreciate it. The least SaneBox could do is perhaps acknowledge the irony of these extra emails.
Does SaneBox Read Your Email?
The company says SaneBox doesn't look at email contents, but rather the header and metadata. I'm sure it's taking into consideration your email history to see if you've corresponded with someone from a particular domain before, and I'd put good money on SaneBox detecting whether your name was typed in the "To" field or whether it's been auto-filled by an email marketing service. I'm sure there's a lot of information SaneBox parses. The important thing to know, though, is that the more you use SaneBox, the smarter it gets.
Training the system is simple. If an email isn't important, drag it to the appropriate folder. SaneBox learns from such actions. If an email ends up in one of your Sane folders but it is important, drag it to your inbox. SaneBox learns from that action, too. I used SaneBox for around a month, and it works well. Dealing with my inbox without this kind of sorting is going to be hard.
Deep Clean Your Email With SaneBox
There are numerous other features, which I'll get to later, but I want to highlight Deep Clean. This feature scans your email account and finds messages you probably don't need anymore. I let it scrub out a mailing list it found from an old job, which freed up almost a gigabyte of storage. That's a big deal if you're trying to free up space in Gmail and Google Drive to avoid paying for Google One. I recommend everyone give this feature a shot, even if it's just once during the free two-week trial.
Other Features: Reminders, Attachments, and Do Not Disturb
SaneBox offers all kinds of features beyond keeping your email tidy. For example, SaneNoReplies is a folder that helps you stay on top of people who have not replied to your messages. When you send messages and the recipients don't reply, your sent emails are stored in this folder until they do.
There are also Reminders—also called SaneReminders—which remind you by a time that you specify to follow up with an email recipient if they haven't done so already. All you have to do is add to the CC or BBC field "[email protected]," or whatever time frame suits you.
Another feature is Attachments, sometimes called SaneAttachments, which automatically saves any attachments that come through your email account to an online storage service of your choosing, such as Dropbox or Box. SaneAttachments has good customization options that let you save the files exactly where you want. In your email, SaneBox replaces the attachment with a link to it in the cloud storage space, once again freeing up space in your email account.
Other features are, arguably, less useful but still nice to have as options. SaneConnect, for example, shows you who, if anyone, you've ever contacted at a particular company—just search for a domain name. It's less useful because you can do the same thing by simply searching your email account for the domain, too. A feature called Do Not Disturb temporarily prevents all emails from reaching your inbox on a schedule. This is handy if you want to pause incoming messages all weekend or during other time off.
Is SaneBox Private?
Logging into your email via a third party requires trust. For its part, SaneBox (the company) says, "Your credentials are encrypted with proven public key cryptography and placed on a server that's unreachable by public Internet." Your messages never leave your email server. We recommend reading more about SaneBox's security policies to make sure you're comfortable with what it does and how it works.
For reference, SaneBox is based in Venice, California.
Escape Inbox Insanity
The great thing about email is anyone can reach you. The terrible thing about email is anyone can reach you. SaneBox offers a compromise: Anyone can reach you, but only essential messages make it to your inbox. If you are someone who feels overwhelmed by the number of messages you receive, SaneBox is one of the best tools you can buy to improve the quality of your life. For busy professionals in many different contexts, you really can't beat what it does.
SaneBox works effectively without creating confusion about what it's doing to your inbox and provides a long list of controls, settings, and features that give you even more tools for making your email experience better and more efficient. SaneBox makes email better, and for that, it's a PCMag Editors' Choice winner with a rare five-star rating. We highly recommend it.
SaneBox turns your inbox back into the inbox it was meant to be by weeding out unimportant messages. With additional features to snooze emails, track when people don't reply, and more, it's an Editors' Choice winner and a receives a rare five-star rating.
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