Sanebox and MacOS Mail

I’ve been a Sanebox user for years now and love it. I use it for two different accounts, one is a regular Gmail account (personal) and the other is a G Suite for Business account (work).

I recently switched from Airmail for Mac back to macOS Mail and have a had weird problem that I think might be Sanebox related. Basically, some mail–and it’s not consistently from the same senders–will entirely bypass my inbox and all the Sanebox filters, but end up as unread in Archive (not All Mail, but Archive). It has no labels at all, but is in Archive.

Importantly, this is only for my Gmail account, not my G Suite account.

When I turn off Sanebox, the problem stops. Sanebox support has looked at the headers and says the move is happening before Sanebox has a chance to touch the email.

I have NO Mail rules and while I do have some rules in Gmail, they have no apparent connection to the emails that are bypassing the inbox and Sanebox.

I had two plugins active – smallcubed’s Mail Act-on and Mail Tags and Butler’s Mailsuite–but those have been disabled and uninstalled. The only plugin enabled is Butler’s Evernote export.

Has anyone heard of anything like this? Any ideas what the problem is? I do not want to live without Sanebox.

Over the last couple of years I’ve heard about problems people have had with Sanebox. There’s one I remember on this forum here.

Apart from technical issues, they, like most add-on email service companies, compile usage data from your emails (what people buy, for what prices, what they’re interested in, travel booking behavior, what groceries users buy, what brands they like, etc) and claim to appropriately anonymize and aggregate the data. (“to our subsidiaries or affiliates only if necessary for business and operational purposes. We reserve the right to use and share aggregated, anonymous data, which does not include any personal data, about our Service’s users as a group for any legal business purpose, such as analyzing usage trends and seeking compatible advertisers and customers.”)

It’s because of this that I do not consider Sanebox, or Edisonmail, or Spark: they all do this, and I’m uncomfortable with it.

I have been considering SaneBox, but that quote concerns me a bit. @bowline: Is that from their T&C that everyone just clicks through? It certainly contradicts what their FAQ says: “Theoretically, users of SaneBox have given us the ability to access both the body and headers of their email. To ensure the privacy of our users our software does its magic by analyzing only the headers of your emails. The bodies of your emails are never downloaded to our servers, and therefore our software can’t see them. Also, the ability to access the headers of your email is limited to our servers which are securely isolated from the public Internet.”

That snippet would make me more comfortable, yet their terms of service don’t narrow down the data usage in quite the same way. It states, “We reserve the right to use and share aggregated, anonymous data, which does not include any personal data, about our Service’s users as a group for any legal business purpose, such as analyzing usage trends and seeking compatible advertisers and customers.” That seems to give them the same breathing room as Spark and Edisonmail, which resell (hopefully sufficiently) anonymized data to sell travel booking behavior, info on items sold by companies and their final prices, what groceries, stores, brands are involved, and, as Edisonmail crows, “research with deep geographic resolution and compete at a granular level.”

I wanted to follow up from the original post. I paused Sanebox for about four days (which was quite painful) and the problem and went away. Then I re-enabled and after about a week the problem hasn’t returned. I don’t know how or why or even if it’s gone for good, but the problem seems to be solved.