Email insanity. Are you tired of having an inbox that is overflowing?
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. In today's video, we are taking a look at SaneBox, an application to help you keep all of your emails in order and deal with fewer emails at any given time.
SaneBox has been around for quite some time and integrates with almost every single email application. Here you see we've got everything from Gmail to both Office 365 and Outlook.com.
Essentially, SaneBox helps you learn your email, identifying which emails, senders, and messages you actually engage with, while filtering out and organizing everything else. Let's jump into my Gmail account, and here you will notice on the left-hand side of my screen I have a number of Sane folders: Sane Later, Sane News, Sane No Replies, and Sane Tomorrow.
I'm going to get into the details of each and every one of these folders, but essentially, SaneBox is learning your email behavior and helping you out by keeping only the most relevant or important emails in your inbox, while filtering other messages into respective folders. You can also create many more customized Sane folders, depending on how you work and manage your email.
When you first install SaneBox, it will analyze thousands of your previous email messages. It wants to learn how you interact with your email and determine where to put things, such as in a newsletter folder, where you might find things that you don't need to see immediately but would still like to browse from time to time.
SaneBox Inbox
As you can see, it's doing a very good job. At this point, I only have about six emails in my inbox, so let's go through some of these folders.
The first one we see is called Sane Later, and as the title suggests, it puts messages here that it does not consider terribly important. These emails are addressed to me, and they are not spam, but SaneBox determines that I haven't clicked on these things recently and that I'm not really engaging with them, so I can check this folder once or twice a day rather than keeping these emails in my inbox.
The second folder has to do primarily with newsletters and marketing material. Here you see it is full of things from Best Buy, Maclean's, and a few others. This folder is mostly for marketing emails, which I might want to unsubscribe from if I no longer need them, but SaneBox correctly places them in the Sane News folder.
There is something interesting that just happened, and it really blew my mind in terms of how SaneBox is learning my behaviors on the fly. You'll notice that I have a bunch of Best Buy messages in my Sane News folder.
Just a few minutes ago, I had a bunch of those Best Buy messages in my inbox. As I was dragging them into the Sane News folder, I must have moved about 15 or 20 of them. Remember, as I'm dragging and moving messages, SaneBox is learning my behavior.
I had left one of the most recent Best Buy messages, and I hadn't dragged it over manually. You know what happened? In front of my very eyes, that message disappeared and reappeared in my Sane News folder.
SaneBox was saying, "Listen, you've moved the last 15 to 20 of these messages. There's a very good chance you don't want to see this in your inbox either, so we're going to move it to your Sane News folder." I think that's absolutely brilliant. It's learning as we go. I can change that behavior if I want to. It hasn't archived or deleted the message. I can always go back and find it, but it's learning my behavior as we go.
For example, if I don't want to see this particular email or sender here, I can just drag it to my Sane Later folder, and SaneBox is already learning about that sender. Perhaps the next message from that sender will already end up in the Sane Later folder.
SaneBox Digest
There is something else I want to show you called the SaneBox Digest. This feature provides a summary of some of my most recent new and unread emails that have gone to other folders.
If I open this digest, I'm given a new menu, showing me some of the recent trainings. By "trainings," it means emails that started in one folder but were moved somewhere else. For example, you can see that a message initially started in the inbox but is currently trained to go into the Sane News folder.
Here’s that Best Buy newsletter example I mentioned earlier. It started in my inbox but has now been trained to go to Sane News. I can change that if I want the messages to come back to my inbox. This digest provides a great summary, and if I scroll down further, I see the Sane News area, showing all the messages from Best Buy that I haven't opened recently. They are trained to go to the Sane News folder, but I can change that if I want. I can train these types of messages to go somewhere else.
Now let's look at the Sane No Replies and Sane Tomorrow folders. I'll start with the Sane Tomorrow folder. Often, as you're going through your emails and checking new messages, you come across something and think, "I don't need to deal with this right now. I'd like to handle this tomorrow." The Sane Tomorrow folder allows you to defer messages.
You can drag messages into Sane Tomorrow, and what's going to happen is that everything within this folder will be moved to your inbox tomorrow morning. This feature provides an easy way to defer emails, making it more convenient than Gmail's snooze feature or other add-ons.
No Replies
The last folder I want to go over quickly is the Sane No Replies feature. This is an interesting one. How many times have you sent a question or a request and are expecting a reply? SaneBox tracks every email you send out and have not received a reply to, and it places them in this folder.
For example, just a few moments ago, I sent an email asking someone if we could still meet and requested a reply by Friday. Since this person has not gotten back to me, the email is here in my Sane No Replies folder. I can check this folder to see which emails have not yet received a response.
However, as soon as this individual does reply, the email will no longer be in this folder because it has met the criteria. The person has replied to me, so I don't need to check if they have responded.
If you are looking for a better way to clean up your inbox and filter out the important emails from the less important ones, SaneBox might be the right solution for you.
I'd like to thank SaneBox for sponsoring today's video. In fact, if you would like to try SaneBox for free and get a special discount only for Simpletivity fans, I encourage you to click the link in the description and the comment below.
I'd love to hear your feedback. Have you already used SaneBox? What is your experience, or what are you most excited about using as you take SaneBox out for a test drive?
Thank you so much for watching today's video. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, leave me a comment, and don't forget to subscribe. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
