SaneBox does a great and helpful job separating the emails you need to see now from those you can consume at leisure, reserving your inbox for the former.
SaneBox works with any IMAP account (including Gmail, MobileMe, Yahoo! Mail, AOL and AIM Mail, and Exchange) and is pretty accurate, but its focus on senders instead of individual emails can lead to misplaced emails. A version to run on your own servers might be handy, too.
Advantages:
- SaneBox reduces your email inbox down to the most important emails
- Quite accurate, SaneBox is appropriately picky about what makes it to your inbox
- You can easily postpone emails with SaneBox, too, and graphical reports encourage good email habits
Drawbacks:
- SaneBox's focus on judging senders and not individual messages can have it misplace certain mail
- It would be swell if SaneBox could perform even more tasks automatically
- SaneBox does not work locally and requires an IMAP or Exchange account
Description:
- SaneBox identifies the important emails in your email inbox.
- All non-critical email is moved to a special (@SaneLater) folder; with Gmail, SaneBox can also just label it.
- SaneBox can classify with up to five categories: top, important, consume at leisure, newsletters, and transactional mail.
- You can keep things simple with only two categories — important or not —, of course, or add custom folders for training.
- Moving mail to two special folders (@SaneTomorrow and @SaneNextWeek, for instance) let you defer emails for any time.
- You can train SaneBox by moving emails to the desired folder; moving to @SaneBlackHole creates a filter to ignore a sender.
- SaneBox can monitor your email account's spam folder for important messages.
- Connecting with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter lets SaneBox know about people you know through these social networks.
- A motivating weekly (or monthly) report gives a graphical account of what kind of mail you got, and how you dealt with it.
- SaneBox supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, MobileMe, AIM and AOL Mail, Exchange and any IMAP or WebDAV email account.
- SaneBox supports Outlook Express /Outlook / Thunder Bird