Sanebox is an interesting twist on email organizing.

Sanebox is a new service receiving acclaim for the novel way to arrange your email.

Usually, email organizing is done when messages arrive. The incoming message is moved to a folder, tagged, changed priority etc according to preset rules.

Sanebox is a little different because it makes use of the fact that all email is stored online. Cloud storage of email can be manipulated from another cloud service, provided it has access via the username and password.

Online storage of email at Gmail, Exchange Server, Hotmail etc works fine with Sanebox. It’s not dependant on your email client at all.

The Sanebox service checks the sender / subject of a new email and moves unimportant emails to a ‘Sanelater’ folder. There’s a daily digest email summary of the unimportant messages received with links to move individual message back to your Inbox.

SaneTomorrow and SaneNextWeek folders take messages temporarily and move then back to your Inbox after the appropriate time (a day or week respectively).

There is also a SaneArchive folder for older messages and SaneBlackHole!

Training is quite simple, just move a message to the folder you want eg SaneLate and Sanebox will detect that move and apply it to similar messages in future.

Obviously, you need online storage of all your email. If you have the older POP email connection that stores all your email in one local storage, like Outlook, then Sanebox isn’t for you.

Outlook users with IMAP connections to online storage like Gmail or Hotmail can use Sanebox as can Exchange Server and Office 365 users.

One of the neat things about the Sanebox approach is that it doesn’t matter what email programs you use. Anything you do in Outlook, on a mobile device or web browser is stored on the cloud where Sanebox can read it and use for managing your emails.

Outlook rules look old fashioned by comparison because while they can deal with incoming messages, rules can’t schedule moves from other folders back to the Inbox. VBA code would be necessary to do that. Sanebox seems a more elegant solution.

Prices range from $4.95 a month to $100 for two years with a free trial available.

See Also

• Get alerts from Outlook RSS feeds
• What’s up with Outlook Rules?
• How do you manage your Inbox