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

SaneBox face lift continues

To all our beloved SaneBox users, please log in and check out our new settings page 

(and for those non-SaneBox lunatics out there… run and sign up for SaneBox right now… jeez)

I thought fielding this new page presented an opportunity to talk about what we hope to accomplish with our new face lift.  Probably all of this is common sense to most of you…

But, for me this was a revelation that came about from hiring Dmitri, our new VP of Growth, who has over seen this whole process with Pablo and his band of Argentine geniuses at GotVertigo

We hope to …

1. become more approachable - email filtering is simply not sexy and can sound somewhat daunting so we need to find a way to show the world how fun and easy it can be

2. explain with text and pictures - some people understand from reading and some from looking - we get that and are trying to do a better job of explaining our features and data in a more rounded way. 

3. separate advanced features from normal stuff

4. stop burying the lead - more important stuff is now bigger and closer to the top of the page.

5. explain that this is all about saving time. it’s not about filtering or deferring or new tools for your email - it is about saving you time so you can do something else.

Still left to do:

1. movies, movies, movies - yup pictures that move

2. face lift for our emails to you. 

3. more work on our help desk.

We love comments and criticism, so if you have a great change you are dying for us to make please send it to support@sanebox.com

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.
Pop-upView Separately

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?  

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

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.