Finally tried out Sanebox because I’ve heard lots of good things about it, and the short review is “I was very disappointed”. I’m still working through my system, but I wanted to share some thoughts just in case it helps somebody else.
First, Sanebox.
I’ve heard about it on podcasts for a long time, and I just recently decided to give it a shot. The idea of having a back end system learn from my behavior sounded very appealing. So I signed up.
It has a couple of really, really good things about it, the primary one for me being the “SaneTomorrow”, “SaneNextWeek”, etc. folders. Drag a message into one of those folders, and it disappears. It shows back up in your inbox at the appropriate time tomorrow, next week, etc. as if it just showed up. That’s pretty cool, and is the biggest “plus” it’s got going for it.
I didn’t play with it long enough for “SaneNoReplies” to really get tested, but I would imagine that would be pretty cool as well. It auto-monitors for replies to messages you’ve sent, and if you don’t get one it lets you know.
As for the cons, there’s one minor one and one huge one.
The minor one is that the pricing page is either confusing or misleading - I’m not sure which to call it. They’ll say the basic plan gives you “two features”, and the middle plan gives you “six features”.
I would think that “SaneTomorrow” and “SaneNextWeek” would be one feature, because they’re both logically part of the category “defer your email until the future” - but they’re not. They’re two separate features. Basically, every separate folder SaneBox creates is a “feature”. Which means that if you want to do much of anything, you get to plan on spending $36/month.
That by itself wouldn’t have stopped me though. The biggest drawback for me - and the thing that stopped me in my tracks - was the ham-fisted way it handles filtering.
For background, I get a TON of email from a server I manage. Much of it is advisory in nature, and doesn’t really need to be read - but it’s important occasionally as a paper trail if something weird happens as it contains information the logs don’t. Some of this email is “you really need to look at ______” sorts of stuff. And some of it is “there’s a problem, right now, that you need to handle”.
Usually I filter it using MailMate filters that sort through the various types and file them away appropriately, so no big deal.
But if I shut off my local filters and leave it to Sanebox, Sanebox can’t differentiate. It all comes from the one server email address, so it’s all the same to Sanebox. I dragged a notification email into the “SaneLater” folder to see how the filtering worked, and all of a sudden everything from the server goes in that folder.
It’s not Bayesian. It’s not ML-based. There’s no intelligence. It’s strictly “email from sender x goes in folder y”.
I realize that not everybody has a server they need to sort through emails from, so maybe a more practical example.
I have a folder called “Paper Trail”. It’s where all of my receipts and super-important stuff goes. So I put some of my “Paper Trail” into a “SaneReceipts” folder, to see how that works.
And again, every message from that email address goes into SaneReceipts. So for a company that sends bills, receipts, support tickets, and company news from a “noreply@asdfcompany.com” address, getting your bills and receipts to file also requires that you auto-file every support ticket and company newsletter as a receipt.
Did some digging. They do offer subject line filtering, but not based on sender and subject - and you have to log into their website to do that. So it’s as hard (or harder) than just setting up a local mail rule.
For that reason, I’m abandoning Sanebox for the moment.
What I’m doing instead, at least for the filtering side…
I use MailMate, so I’m digging much more into the automation rules. MailMate allows you to have complex logic in rules, so I can do things like:
If the message is from x, with a subject line containing “your receipt”, file it to “Paper Trail”.
but I can also do things like:
If the message is from x, y, or z, with a subject line containing either “your receipt” or “your bill”, file it to “Paper Trail”
This lets me quickly differentiate the stuff that has to be auto-filed. But MailMate also lets me come up with smart folders that have their own rules, which trigger as soon as a message becomes available to that folder.
As an example, I made a folder called “7 Days”. If a message is over 7 days old, it shows up in that folder and the folder’s rules trigger.
This means that some newsletters that I want to get, but might not have time to read that week, can be auto-deleted or auto-archived. Or if I get busy with something and my notice that my Amazon package was delivered is still sitting in my inbox, I can just auto-archive it out of there after a week.
There’s a surprising amount of email that can be dealt with this way, and it helps keep stuff from piling up in my inbox. I’m highly distractable, so that can be a real problem.
MailMate also allows me to make my own “blackhole” folder. If I tag a message as “blackhole”, I have to keep that message, but future messages from that sender can be auto-deleted via an inbox rule.
I definitely don’t have it all figured out yet, but it’s an interesting journey. I’m still playing around to see if there’s a reasonable way to mimic Sanebox’s delay feature - but I also get the feeling that email might not be the way to fly with that. I’ll post back if I figure something out.
Anyway, those are my thoughts - such as they are. Hoping that maybe this might help somebody thinking through their email overwhelm. 
