Sanebox; Only option for stock Apple Mail App Users?

I am new (obviously). I recently discovered Sanebox. I did not want to like it (seems a little heavy handed and has a monthly fee). But is there an alternative for people who want to stick with the Apple Mail App and iCloud Mail Service and want more functionality?

For sorting email into folders, some ways that Sanebox is better than iCloud Mail Server Side Rules-- 1) domain filter wildcards; 2) subject filter; 3) arguably less time to setup a rule; 4) ability to pause filtering, and probably more.

I have always prided myself on immediately unsubscribing from email lists as the emails came in. However, now I am now wondering whether it makes more sense just to sort those emails into SaneBox’s Blackbox feature? For instance, I often get stuck in the loop of purchasing a product from a website, getting added to the email list, unsubscribing, then purchasing the same product from the same website a few months later, getting added to the email list, etc., etc. If I were to sort the original email list email to the Blackbox then I never have to worry about it again.

There are a lot of other features that I am still trying to figure out-- snoozing emails, reminders, attachment management, etc. Honestly, I never wanted a lot of features for my email. However, I am finding that even for the relatively small amount of email that I receive that I want more features than the Apple Mail App and iCloud Mail Service offer. It does seem that having a Mac that is on all the time running email filters is an option but I am not sure that I want to go down that road.

Thank you for indulging the newbie!

I´m not using Sanebox, because I use multiple mail addresses, and sandbox can’t handle them.
But if you made a purchase, then send the mailings in the BlackBox, and after a while you made a second purchase with that company, are you getting the important Mails (Invoice…) in that case, beside the Sandbox setting?

As long as a mailing comes from some spam-sender, it is often recommended to just delete the mail, and not to use the “unsubscribe” function, cause with the use of this function, the related mail-address becomes “confirmed”, and the Spam-Sender is making even more money because of this confirmation status, when selling the address.

You can have a similar functionality with a lot of Sanebox-Functions, in Apple Mail on the Mac, if you use the rules and other functions there.

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@Ulli - actually Sanebox can handle up to 4 email addresses. How many do you have?

30+ at the Moment…
20 more Charakters

And even for 4 Mailboxes, Sandbox is charging an insane 299$ per year, just to do mostly, what could also be done with the On-board equipment of Apple Mail…

I feel like having 30 inboxes is an edge case that probably makes a lot of things more difficult or not workable and isn’t really an inditement of Sanebox.

Re: pricing, I’ve always found Sanebox to be very reasonable for what it provides, and doubly reasonable in that they were super willing to come up with a custom plan (at a discount!) to get me as a customer. If you really do need to support 30 inboxes, Im sure they could whip something up for you.

I’ve been a happy Sanebox user for years, off and on. When I’m on a privacy, Mail.app loving binge, it’s the only thing that works. Otherwise, I go through periods of using other mail apps with a server in the middle. I’m not aware of anything that is as flexible or useful as Sanebox for what it does.

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@Ulli I have thought about just having multiple email addresses with no rules rather than multiple email rules for a single email address. :grinning:

@thickweb What types of things can be negotiated on a custom plan? One of the best things about Sanebox is their focus on the customer, including their in person, US based customer support, which is excellent. Still, it is hard for me to get used to training their system rather than just hammering rules into a dialogue box like iCloud Mail Server Side Rules or Mail App rules. As you note, for Mail App users I am not sure that there are many alternatives.

Ohh, I have a couple of Rules in Apple Mail for these addresses.
On one hand, I have my Name reserved with all major provider for freemail, a long time ago already, just to be sure that nobody could misuse it.
On the other hand, I use a system of specific Mail-Addresses for every company (and so on) I get in contact with. Those dresses are always like “companyname @ myadress . com”.
With this method, I can identify every security break or if a company is illegaly making money with selling private informations.
I also can sort the Mails into specific folders, and so on.
For the addresses of company’s, I get into a regular exchange of mails, I have a separate IMAP/SMTP-Account.
All other addresses are captured by a “capture-all-function” and I replay with a “No Answer Adress” and the specific address inside the “Answer to” Field, of the Mailing-App.
I am using this system since the 90´s in this, or a similar, way (parts run thru an evolution), and it works pretty well.

@Ulli Good system. Ahead of the times. I used Apple’s hide my email service (which is somewhat similar?) for the first time today purchasing a book from a site I never plan to visit again. We will see it goes. In general, though, I have been using one email address and have a lot of rules.