What do you do with the email once you’ve read and processed it?

(this was asked by a user today and it seemed like a topic screaming out for a blog post)

First, that’s a good question.

I’m a big fan of INBOX zero so I do strongly suggest moving your processed INBOX email out of that folder.  See my comment below about were to put it.

Having said that, I don’t think you need to be compelled to clean out your unimportant folders. SaneLater zero just doesn’t have the same zing.

Filing is mostly a waste of energy (unless your email client doesn’t search very well).   Filing is the equivalent of Yahoo! directories in 1995.  Since key word search didn’t work you had to manually go thru a tree of folders to see where your information might be.  (not to self:  I should blog about how to effectively key word search in each mail client)

So… file into large bins.  Don’t file by any criteria that you can easily search for.   So… file into an”Archive” folder or “SalesLeads”, “Receipts” (or something else equally large.)  SaneBox archives into a single existing Archive folder or if none exists we create a folder called SaneArchive.

Don’t delete email unless it has a large attachment that you have on disk somewhere else. Or you are in one of those awful threads where people keep emailing you versions of word documents.  In that case, the originator of that email is causing a huge configuration management issue by creating a zillion versions of the same document held in a zillion email accounts.  So, you are welcome to delete the old ones.  Word should already have the edit history in it internally so the latest version is the one to keep. Disk is cheap and memory is fragile so don’t delete your email.

SaneBox will automatically cycle your oldest emails into SaneArchive for you so no need to do that manually.  We leave your latest 5000 emails in your Sane folders and move the rest to SaneArchive.  Think of that as your attic (but an attic you can search using key words).

And I do find that many users just let the SaneLater stuff build up and get cycled into SaneArchive.   That does seem to be the most energy and time efficient mode.  When you get the email summary digest each day feel free to click“Archive All” if you want to make that process go faster :-)

Happy Day Light Savings Day to all,

Stuart

Stuart Roseman

President/Founder SaneBox

Notice 2 new buttons in your SaneBox email digest!!   Flag &Train these emails… takes you to a web page to conveniently do that. You can also archive from that web page! Archive All… yeah you can just archive them all.  If you don’t have an archive folder, we will create SaneArchive for you and put them there. We also call this the Bijan-Button (his idea). If you see something you want to process and everything else is archive-worthy, click “Flag and Move to Inbox” on the interesting one, wait a moment, and then click “Archive All” And, in the odd instance, where we made a mistake, click “Train to INBOX” and that will never happen again.
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Notice 2 new buttons in your SaneBox email digest!!  

Flag &Train these emails… takes you to a web page to conveniently do that. You can also archive from that web page!

Archive All… yeah you can just archive them all.  If you don’t have an archive folder, we will create SaneArchive for you and put them there. We also call this the Bijan-Button (his idea).

If you see something you want to process and everything else is archive-worthy, click “Flag and Move to Inbox” on the interesting one, wait a moment, and then click “Archive All”

And, in the odd instance, where we made a mistake, click “Train to INBOX” and that will never happen again.

Soon you won’t have to visit your SaneLater folder

We here at SaneBox think you should spend as little time as possible on your email. You have better things to do with your time!

So we take the unimportant stuff out of your INBOX so it won’t distract you.

And we send you an email digest of the unimportant stuff so you can quickly search for nuggets of gold.

Now you can move those nuggets to your INBOX from the digest!!!

If you are like me and you want to stay in your INBOX whenever possible this new feature is a huge boon. With one click in your email digest (Arrow #2 in the picture), you flag and move any unimportant email and our email monkeys will move that email to your INBOX and flag it  to make it easy to find.

You can still “train” a particular kind of email (Arrow #1 in the picture) to your INBOX from the digest with a single click.  And when you do that **all** emails of that kind will be deemed INBOX-worthy.

Now you have to find something productive to do with all this time we are saving you. Remember your family?  your job? an old friend?  

What does your SaneBox Ranking mean?

Your weekly activity report now declares your “ranking” amongst the other SaneBox users. What does this number mean?

The idea behind the ranking is to give each SaneBox user points for good email behavior and take away points for bad behavior.  Your overall count reflects this algorithm.  And your particular ranking is meant to nudge users to develop better email habits.

The ultimate SaneBox user would do the following:

1. Process their email the first time you open it. (deal with it and then file,archive,delete or defer it)

2. do a good job of declaring as much email as possible unimportant.  

David Allen in GTD says to focus on the most important thing **now**. And avoid getting distracted by the shiny stuff. You can only do this if you are willing to admit that there are lots of emails that are unimportant.  In SaneBox parlance, this means that you get penalized for gratuitously making emails INBOX worthy.  Seriously, do you need to know that your new toothbrush shipped in the last 5 minutes. 

3. Process more email.  Sorry those of you who get less email.  We are rewarding the heavy lifting that some of our high bandwidth users are doing.  But don’t give up, the other 3 rules can overcome this one.

4. Don’t fidget with your unimportant email.  That stuff is unimportant for a reason. We put it in a separate folder so you won’t feel the siren call.  If you can’t bear the feeling that you are missing something, have your email digest summary arrive more often.

We will be adding to these rules over time, but this gives you a sense of why you are super star or why you might need to change some of those bad email behaviors.

Best Wishes,

Stuart

President/Founder SaneBox

Announcing… User defined Sane folders

Hi Guys,

We have always tried to make SaneBox as GTD-like as possible. GTD means do what is most important right now. Keep your focus and be productive. SaneBox does this by creating an INBOX with exactly what you need to deal with NOW. But, GTD also points out that there are projects that need to get done later that require little pieces of work as you go along.  Now SaneBox addresses this too.

One of the highest requested features on SaneBox is the ability for us to filter by topic instead of importance.  One user suggested the ability to create a folder with receipts that needed to be booked into an expense report at the end of the month. This suggested use case really resonated with me.

I use Kashoo.com to keep SaneBox’s accounting books.  And there is a set of emails that need to get “booked” every month as an expense or income.  So having those emails corralled into one folder for me is a huge time saver.

Now SaneBox can’t guess which email receipts need to be booked in my accounting system, versus receipts that are simply needed for reference, so to make this work, we invented “User Defined Sane Folders”.

You click on the “add user defined folder” link in the http://sanebox.com/settings page.  Name the folder whatever you want. And start throwing emails into it.  

I already have a @SaneKashoo folder and it has lowered my stress level enormously. Instead of being bummed out everytime I see those receipt emails that I haven’t booked yet, I now know that they are waiting for me to deal with them when I have time.  All nicely organized in @SaneKashoo.

We have plans to allow users to re-use each other’s Sane folder definitions and we are thinking of rewarding those users with the **most** re-used folders.

But, in the meantime, make yourself one and make your life a little more organized.

Hope you enjoy this feature as much as I am!

Best Wishes,

Stuart

How to get SaneBox for free… forever

Last week, somewhat quietly, we fielded Referral Rewards. Thanks to Andrew Parker for a great idea.

Here’s how it works:

You join SaneBox. SaneBox will move distracting emails out of the way.  And using our defer, black hole, and SPAM monitor folders you will save yourself copious amounts of time and effort.  AND your first 30 days are free.

Then, you invite a friend to sign up for SaneBox either using the invitation page or sending them a special invitation link.  They sign up.  You auto-magically get another free 30 days of SaneBox. You get 30 days for every friend that signs up.

So sign up 11 friends this year and get SaneBox for free for the whole year!

Do this every year and you never have to pay us a cent.  But, shhhh…. don’t tell anyone because we’d like for some people to pay :-)

It is finally Summer in Boston.  Can you tell that puts all of us here at SaneBox into a good mood?

Get your digest whenever you want

The biggest challenge for those using SaneBox is “letting go” of the unimportant stuff and concentrating on their INBOX. To help with this, we send an “unread, unimportant email digest” which allows everyone to quickly scan the cruft to make sure there isn’t a nugget of gold there.

Now you can have this digest whenever you want it!

go to http://sanebox.com/settings and click on “Email Preferences”

You can choose to get the digest

1. Every Day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

2. Any time (12:00AM, 1:00AM, etc…)

then 3. Click “Add”

You can “Add” as many scheduled digest times as you would like.

You can remove all of the current scheduled digest times, but don’t because you should check your @SaneLater folder regularly.  

Remember to make sure we have the correct time zone for your location so these times are correct.

Enjoy!

Stuart

President/Founder SaneBox

Using your “Digest of unread unimportant emails”

1. This is where you click to change the number of times you get the digest.

2. This is a link to a webpage to help you triage **all** your unimportant email at once.

3. If I want this bi-monthly payroll approval reminder to go in my INBOX, I would click here.

By default, all SaneBox users get a “Digest of unread unimportant emails” each afternoon.  This digest is a summary of all the emails that SaneBox moved to your SaneLater folder. And a summary of your trainings.

We created the digest to try to give users better habits around their unimportant email.  I have found that my beloved SaneBox users either completely ignore their SaneLater folder or they check it way too often.  We later added training info to the email because I wanted a convenient way for users to check on their most recent trainings.

Users that ignore their SaneLater folder have come to believe that putting emails off means you never have to deal with them.  The healthier approach is to triage those emails archiving most of them, promoting ones that are INBOX worthy, and dealing with the others as time permits. We will continue to empower the digest so that you will be able to do all these things quickly and easily.  Currently you can only easily retrain emails (stay tuned for POWER digest features coming to your email client soon)

Users that check their SaneLater folder too often are simply afraid to let go.  The digest is meant to be the security blanket that you need to do that.  Concentrate on the important stuff or better yet get something important done that has nothing to do with your email.  When the digest comes, check the unimportant stuff. Have the digest come more often if you are really anxious but stop nervously checking your SaneLater folder!

Thanks everyone!Stuart

Status of SaneBox

In my on-going attempt to live my startup life out loud, here is the status of SaneBox.com

SaneBox was started on 2/20/2010.  

It automatically files unimportant emails into a @SaneLater folder so your Inbox is free of distractions.  

It does this with global rules and a statistical analysis of your email history and your relationships with other social networks.  Training is as easy as moving an email from the wrong folder to the correct one. It has an @SaneBlackHole folder for training emails to trash and folders for deferring emails. It can also discern up to 5 levels of importance and file accordingly. It can report every week on how you are doing with your email.

Milestones:

1 month to first private beta user.

6 months to first direct free bundled competition: Google Priority Inbox

8 months to public release on gmail and google apps.

Now: (11 Months later)

Since going public (users having to pay after the initial 30 day trial) we are converting at 11.33%.  So we get 11 paying customers for every 100 trails.  People tell me that this is good, but I still reach out to the other 89 users every time to see how we failed them. I will blog about why people quit SaneBox separately.

We have been adding features and improving accuracy and scaling and now have aworking beta to provide SaneBox for ALL IMAP servers: yahoo.com, me.com, exchange, dovecot, you name it.  This involves taking user passwords so we have upped the overall security of everything including encrypting those passwords and all authorization credentials with a key that has to be typed in by hand.  If someone were to steal the code AND the database, they still would not have access to those passwords.  If you want in on the beta, email me: roseman dash beta at sanebox dot com.

The website was running a bounce rate of 62% so I hired Performable to put together some new landing pages and they are in the midst of A/B testing to bring those numbers under control.  I’ll blog about this effort separately.  What do you think of the website?  My team hates the font.

I am installing 2 new blades with 24 cores and 128GB of RAM each which will 5x our current capacity.

So far our traffic has been generated 100% virally. It’s time to start paying for key words.

That’s it for now.  I’m off with my wife for a kidless, not-on-call, 4 nights and 5 days, beach vacation tomorrow. It’s supposed to start snowing again here in Boston at 9AM. Our plane takes off at 8:45AM.  Wish us luck.