Meet Vanessa: One-stop marketing shop by day, volunteer firefighter on the weekend

As a freelance marketing professional, Melissa juggles everything from business development and graphic design to media outreach and event planning for a client roll that includes the seventh-largest healthcare system in the United States. As the wife of a career firefighter—and a volunteer herself—she juggles a demanding schedule at home.

Busy does not begin to describe Vanessa. Staying organized helps her hold it all together—at least it did, until her silently mushrooming email inbox threatened to overwhelm her.

“I think I had 36,000 emails,” she said. “I didn’t even want to look at it. All the mail alerts on my phone were killing me.”

Her biggest enemy was bacn, those emails you get from companies after you purchase from their online store or sign up for a free perk. They added up to hundreds of new emails every day, an onslaught she simply didn’t have the time to sort through.

“People would tell me, ‘Oh my gosh, you need to erase some of your email,’” Vanessa said. “But it’s not that easy when you have more than 30,000 messages.”

She hit her breaking point when she started missing important emails from clients. She nearly lost a couple of them because their emails had gotten buried in all the noise. Her inbox had reached such epic proportions that she was ready to give up on the email account she’d had since college.

“I thought, you know what? There’s so much junk in here, I’m just not going to come back and use it anymore,” she said.

As a last-ditch effort, she decided to try an email filtering service. But the first tool she tried didn’t work.

Then she discovered SaneBox. She was a little leery at first about giving her login credentials, but after learning more about the company (and later seeing how well it works), she’s glad she did.

“The time I’ve saved, you can’t measure it.”

“I went to sleep, and then I woke up and turned my phone on. In my iPhone, it has the alert notifications on, and, usually, it’s pretty fixed—you know, dot, dot, dot—because there’s so much [unread email] it won’t even share the number,” she said.

“As soon as I opened my phone, it was all gone. I think I only had four notifications, and it was all just stuff from actual human people. I thought, ‘What happened?’”

Then she remembered SaneBox.

Now that her email is usable again, Vanessa’s life has gotten smoother. No more missed emails. No more frustrated clients. And the best part is, she didn’t have to lift a finger.

“If I sat down and went through over 30,000 emails and tried to unsubscribe to everything and clean everything out, I would be sitting there for days and days and days and days,” she said.

“The time I’ve saved, you can’t measure it. I’m not having to scroll through and scroll through and scroll through.”

About SaneBox

Ready to join Vanessa in the quest for email sanity? SaneBox is an easy-to-use inbox tool that will make your email manageable again by prioritizing important emails and summarizing the rest. Learn more about the full suite of productivity features, and start today for free »