Take Control Of Your Email Inbox With This Tool

If your inbox is anything like mine – full of promotional emails for running shoes and sundresses, event announcements and invitations, and endless (but very informative useful) e-newsletters, then I’m sure you have experienced my daily struggle.

This is me, listening to Beyonce while going through my inbox – daily.

Checking email is a daily chore that can be very overwhelming and time consuming, taking away from our more important tasks and duties that we need to accomplish. As millennial women who are on the go, we are constantly connected to the electronic messages we receive on a daily basis. Although I have certain permissions set within my Gmail inbox for certain messages, I still find myself spending hours getting lost in my email.

Enter SaneBox, an email management tool that is designed to make the relationship with your flooded inbox less of a hassle and more organized and productive.  I receive dozens of emails with multiple subjects a day, so I was interested in how this particular service would differ from Gmail’s automatic folder functions that exist in Inbox.

1. After entering my email address on their website, the SaneBox algorithm immediately went to work. For about 10-12 minutes, SaneBox combed through the 12,842 emails (who knew?!) that were currently in my inbox. This initial “email cleanup” gave SaneBox an idea of the type of emails I receive and how I respond to them. The algorithm also pulled everything that isn’t important and left those messages that are of the utmost importance.

2. Next, SaneBox separated those important and non-important messages into three categories: SaneArchive, SaneLater and SaneNoReplies – all of which showed up as folders in my Gmail inbox. As I scrolled through each of the folders, I noticed that it aggregated certain messages by date, which ones I can answer at a later date and emails that had yet to receive a reply. Upon first glance, it was a little confusing because there are still emails coming into my normal inbox, but I soon noticed that many of the daily digest emails I receive had been pushed to my SaneLater folder, which is helpful because a lot of times I open those messages and get lost in all of the links – thus not allowing me to get any work done.

3. The SaneBox dashboard is really where all of the magic happens. Here, I am able to set permissions on how each of the various functions performs within my Gmail inbox, and even set up SaneReminders, which inform me when I need to respond to a message by a certain time. There is also a cool function called SaneBlackhole, which pretty much performs just as it sounds. For instance, if I am still receiving emails from a particular sender after I’ve unsubscribed, I can put that sender’s email into my SaneBlackhole folder, and all future emails from that sender will go straight to the trash.

Also, because we sometimes forget that not every email needs our immediate response, the SaneSnooze function allows for me to move messages in and out of this folder and set when I must respond to them (tomorrow, next week, etc.) The cool thing about this function is that when it is time for me to respond, it pushes the message to the top of my inbox where I can see it immediately. I have the ability to customize each of these functions at my leisure.

The verdict: I’ve only used SaneBox for a few days, but I do understand the value of pushing messages into certain inboxes in order to make my day a little bit easier and more productive. However, it does take a bit of time to set the permissions so that the messages that I need won’t get lost in the mix. SaneBox also has a feature that combines all of your emails from the day and shares it with you in a digest email so that you really can stay out of your inbox and not feel obligated to check messages every five seconds.

Overall,  I think SaneBox is a cool tool that with time, will allow for me to become smarter in how I respond to email and more productive during my day.

[Editor’s note: This post is sponsored by SaneBox. All thoughts and opinions are our own.]