SaneBox: AI E-mail Optimizer

This is Generative Phil, where I try new AI tools to solve one of my real problems and give it a rating between 1 - 10 Evil Robot Overlords (10, of course, being so essential it's a little scary).

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This was an insanely busy week. Irregularly busy.

I found myself with my hands on my keyboard with every spare moment and still falling behind on my priorities.

But sometimes I love weeks like this because I realize my lowest priority daily tasks.

And guess what came in dead last, as in, "It's midnight and I guess I'll do this right before I crash..."?

E-mails.

Enter SaneBox (affiliate link), which promises to organize your Google inbox and learn what you want to prioritize using AI.

Let's get started.

PROBLEM

My inbox is constantly a mess and I spend more time deleting than reading and replying.

I miss important messages and it has caused me to lose 'reputation points' with clients.

I need a tool that can take the place of a personal assistant to cut down my daily e-mail time.

PROCESS

Naturally, I was able to immediately log in with the same Google account I use for my personal e-mail and approve the necessary capabilities for SaneBox.

This part is always intimidating as a user, but I get why it's necessary.

I'm then taken to a video that briefly introduces the structure of how they organize e-mails and how you train the AI.

In short, they create Sane folders (SaneNews, SaneNoReplies, SaneTomorrow) and organize your e-mails using labels into these folders.

At first, they're guessing what they think is the right folder. By dragging-and-dropping into the proper folder, the model learns how to better organize in the future.

Seems easy enough! Moving on.

After approving all of the folders they recommended on multiple screens, I'm taken to the dashboard. 14-day free trial and no e-mail required! Score!

Plenty of options, but for now I want to see how my inbox has changed and whether it's useful.

So I log in and...

RESULTS

A lot of new folders under 'Labels' has appeared in my Google Mail!

It seems as a start almost everything that wasn't an e-mail from a real connection was tagged 'SaneNews' from spam to newsletters to cold LinkedIn outreach.

I found this quite useful as I could 'Select All' and delete 50 at a time with a high level of accuracy.

The rest mostly ended up in 'SaneNoReplies', which is every 'real' e-mail I received that requires a reply from either me or someone else.

Again, very accurate.

I was then able to drag and drop e-mails into 'SaneTomorrow', 'SaneNextWeek', or 'SaneNextMonth' based on urgency.

From here, the AI should learn the level of urgency based on how I've sorted in the past.

I ended up dumping almost everything into 'SaneTomorrow' or 'SaneNextWeek', as if something doesn't deserve a response until next month it's likely one to delete.

I think these categories may be a bit too broad to start, but I know that training is available in the dashboard.

RESULTS

Ultimately, I believe this will be useful with time and training, but right now it's mostly just an effective way to tag spam vs. not spam.

It did that very well, but Google's sorting is already pretty strong.

In other words, this isn't an 'out of the box' solution, but if you're willing to work the system (which I very much am) I can see how it will be useful in the future.

There are features that may exist but I would love to have as part of the e-mail experience right away including 'unsubscribe' from the e-mail selection page, a bit more useful initial folders (instead of OneMonth it seems more useful to have a ThreeDays default), and an initial sorting based on past behavior by looking into previous received vs sent data.

That's why I'm giving SaneBox seven Evil Robot Overlords out of ten. I see how this could be incredibly useful moving forward, but the initial experience could have more useful features so it doesn't feel like a simple spam filter.

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And if you have pitches for what tech you'd like me to cover next, let me know in the comments.

About the Author

Phil Ranta, is the CEO of Spree , a shoppable video platform and media company focused on health and wellness creators and brands. A 2021 LinkedIn Top Voice in Innovation & Tech , Phil has been creating content for the Internet and building Internet businesses professionally for nearly 20 years, starting on MySpace and riding trends to the present. He was the Head of Gaming Creators, North America at Facebook, the first network lead at Fullscreen, the COO at Studio71, and spent 10 years as a working comedian (including 2 years on cruise ships). He's a husband, a dad of two littles, and an insufferable digital media wonk.

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