Randall F. Dean tests SaneBox, an AI email tool that sorts messages into folders like SaneBlackHole and SaneLater. He cut his weekly inbox from 1,000 messages to about 10 and saves one to two hours per week. The tool learns as you train it by moving mail into categories.
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Hey everybody, Randall F. Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. I was recently given the opportunity to give a test drive to the email sort of add-on tool called SaneBox. It actually works with your inbox in a whole bunch of different mail clients to sort of help you manage when, especially if you're dealing with a whole lot of email and information overload. Pretty clever little tool because it sort of allows you to teach your email using the SaneBox capabilities which emails are important, which emails are more informational in purpose, like an e-newsletter, which things aren't very important at all, and which things are junk and spam. And the nice thing is, is by it having this capability, It sort of almost acts like a bit of an email assistant and helps you get to the core of what it is you're trying to do. Now, interestingly, um, I decided to use it on, of all things, my Yahoo Mail account, because that is the account I've had the longest. It was my first internet email account. I got it way back when some people were still using AOL, and I basically was using it for all personal emails. And the internet email is for all other things. Anything you're signing up for on the web, anything that you're making a purchase with, all that kind of stuff. Don't give it your work email. Don't give it your personal email because that's where all the junk and spam gets generated from and it can really flood you. And I would even argue things like your, you know, e-newsletters and stuff you might want to send to that fourth account because that way you'll be choicefully looking at it rather than it coming in and taking some of your attention when you need to keep your focus. So what I wanted to do, let me show you what's sort of cool about this. Let's pop out of here and let's actually go into my Yahoo Mail account real quick, and I just got to tell you something. I spent like 10 minutes today getting my inbox to here, and the interesting thing about what SaneBox does is it helps you with setting up some folders. And so let's go into the folders here real quick, and I want to show you a few of the folders that it set up. Let me try that one more time. If I page down a little, you'll see SaneBlackHole. That's probably where you're going to put the junk and spam. SaneLater, which is ones that you don't really need to see right now. Sane and Sane Screener. Now, Sane Screener is really interesting because it pulls in all the emails that it sort of wants you to take a look at to help train your SaneBox over time to get better and better over time. And what will happen is I got a message that said, please review these 785 messages. Now, I need you to hear this— that's probably what came in in the last several days. That's how many are coming into this crazy account. But what's interesting about it is that that, you know, I go in and I click on the link inside there. I go to the digest and here's the digest. This one is Show All. This one is Yersin Screener. And what you can do, which is interesting, like here, this looks like it's sort of just more of a, you know, junk email trying to, you know, might not even be real to get me to look at on a lending request that I haven't made. And so what I can do is I can train the email and I can go in and say, same black hole. So you can go into the same screener and it will show you sort of the emails that it wants you to take a look at to sort of teach it what it is that you want to do with emails like this in the future. And so what you can see is like, here's a good one. Um, I didn't put in a relending request. Um, this is somebody probably trying to do some financial something, but I don't want anything to do with it. So I'll click the little checkbox. I'll go to train and move and train. One of the options is same black hole, which tells it in the future, I just don't even want messages like that. Um, here's another one, uh, Live Heal Vibe Healthcare. I don't know who that is. I have nothing to do with them. I will train this one also to the same black hole. Another lone one. Let's go in and train this one to same black hole. So as you can see, you can do that. But now, now here's one. This one's from GoToWebinar. I'm going to take this one and train it instead to SaneLater. So that way, if I want to go find something from a group I know I've done some work with in the past, that way I can know that it's going to be in a place that's a little bit easier for me to find. Here's another one. This one is related to this, and I'm actually going to take this one and just move it right into the folder it belongs into, which is my frequent flyer, because that's related to something I'm doing with Delta. And then I, I'm happily married, been married for coming up on 30 years. Well, I don't need a date link up and, oh wait, I thought this was a dating site. It's for a metal roof upgrade. Train. Same black hole. And so you see, you'll spend a few minutes a week training this, but over time, as you keep training it, what's going to happen is you are going to get a better and better and better flow of emails coming in that are more accurate for what it is you're trying to do. And so what I'm going to do now is go back up here to the SaneBox icon, and you'll see as you go to the site, you can give it a little test run. But what I want to do is go back here to my digest, and it's going to click this back, and I can now take a look at my SaneLater. And in here's all the things that I like to do in here. Like here's one from order receipt. And so for this one, what I'm going to want to do is just, you know, move it to my vendors folder. And I would move this one because it's related to some travel insurance we recently bought for an upcoming trip to frequent flyer, you know. So in essence, I'm trying to sort of teach this over time by going into each one of these, you know, is this something that I want to see or not want to see? And then the beauty of it is once you get it trained, you'll go back and, you know, I used to get 1,000 emails a week in this account. I'm getting 10. That's a big dang deal. 10 in my primary. Now there's stuff going into the other and you have to go do that little bit of review. But when I compare that to how much time I was spending, you know, going through and selecting all those emails and deleting them, this is going to save me maybe an hour or two a week. That matters. And if I were using it at work, I could see it potentially, you know, especially if my work account had been somewhat corrupted and I maybe overused it for signing up for too many things. But I also don't really I have the option to get rid of my work email address or change it. Yeah, maybe it might not be a bad little tool to work with to reduce the amount of email and information overload and the pressure that that creates. So, you know, I say this is a tool that may be really helpful for some people, especially people struggling with higher levels of info and email overload and distraction. Really helpful if you're dealing with just a lot of junk and spam. So maybe worth taking a look. Hope you found this useful and maybe you can go out and check it out and give it a try. Once again, my name is Randy Dean. I am the email sanity expert. You can go check out more about me at my website, randalldean.com. Obviously, if you like these videos, please like the video. Please consider subscribing to the channel. Please make a comment. That actually really helps with the algorithm. And if you're interested, I actually have a YouTube video list guide that I'm sharing with my YouTube subscribers that gives you links to a whole bunch of my other YouTube videos, more in a, you know, index to make it easy for you to find the content you'd like. So if you're interested, send me an email, YouTube PDF, and I'll get you that bonus PDF and a couple others. Thank you for your time. Have a great day.
