Everyone’s email is a mess. Your INBOX contains multi-million dollar deal memos and bulk email from retailers you visited years ago all sorted chronologically. So an offer for Viagra may come ahead of a job offer.

SaneBox solves this problem. It automagically decides what emails “can wait” and moves those to a separate SaneLater folder. You are left with a clean, priority INBOX. And If you disagree with our prioritization, you simply move the email back to your INBOX and we will never make that mistake again.

To reassure those thinking of using SaneBox, here are some of the main ways we protect your security and privacy at SaneBox:

#1 with a bullet is our software can not see the content of your emails.  The body of your emails will never touch our servers.

#2 with a bullet is that your authentication information whether it is a google oauth credential or a username/password is industrial strength encrypted in the database. An industrial strength passcode must be entered to even start up our software.  This means that someone could walk off with the entire database and the entire code base and still not get access to a a single authentication credential. And the master startup passcode is known to only a few trusted employees.

#3 with a bullet is that your social network information is ONLY used as an input into our importance engine.

#4  You will never receive a marketing email from us.  We know you signed up because you get too much email.  We don’t want to add to that. We send emails when you start up and cancel.  We send you a regular weekly activity report (your activity) and a digest of your unimportant email. Both of these can be turned off - please don’t they both have information crucial to using the system.  Most users get a personal email from me welcoming them to SaneBox.

#5 The computers that calculate the importance of your emails and label them are unavailable for inbound connections from the public Internet.

#6 The calculation of importance is done by an algorithmic engine.  Only the engine looks at the headers of your emails and your social network connections, not people.  Our engineers work on the algorithmic engine not the email.

#7 Turning off SaneBox is as easy as turning it on.  Two Clicks and we will restore your INBOX to it’s original incredibly messy state and securely remove your information from our databases.

#8 Our business will only succeed if we protect your privacy.  Therefore, we take security and privacy very very very seriously.

#9 This engineering team has also made on-line casinos for publicly traded corporations. We know how to make things secure.

A friend just had a baby daughter.  Instead of doing my usual and sending a one shot email, I thought I would create a post in case these hints can help someone else.  

All my best to all the parents out there.  It is so easy to forget how scary the crying was at first and how little they are when they first come out.  Seeing a picture of the new baby brought it all back.

1. This DVD is brilliant. And the stuff in it actually works.  Imagine being able to always get your baby to stop crying :-)

http://www.amazon.com/Happiest-Baby-Block-Crying-Longer/dp/B0006J021C/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1303396127&sr=8-4

2. When you baby gets to be about 12-14 lbs or 6 months old this book becomes soooo important. Figure out which of you is the tough one. The tough parent listens to the crying and the other one should stay out of ear shot.  In my house I was the tough one.  Both my kids stopped crying and went to sleep after about 20 minutes of this.  I waited 1 minute, then 2 minutes, then 4 minutes.  I never got to 8 minutes.  We had a video monitor so I could see that each of my kids was fine. And once they learn how to put themselves to sleep, they are soooo much happier.

http://www.amazon.com/Solve-Your-Childs-Sleep-Problems/dp/0743201639/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303396327&sr=1-1

3. Never let your daughter sleep in the same bed with you guys after they are old enough to realize what is going on.  It is a slippery slope.  When they are small you are tempted to do it because it is soooo much easier.  But you will pay for this down the road.  My wife and I are the only parents we know whose kids don’t slip into our bed in the middle of the night and torture us.  Occasionally if the kids are upset, one of us will lie down with them in their bed.

4. Consider putting the changing table in the bathroom.  We did this and it changed our lives.  The sink is right there for washing your hands.  And the smell stays in the bathroom.  I actually had a surface mount changing station put in to save room (It’s pricey, but I thought of it as $999/48 months = $20/month - 2 years for 2 kids):

http://www.babychangingstations.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=KB111-SSRE&Category_Code=SSBCS-SI

5. Register a gmail address for your baby and start sending emails with pictures and thoughts to them now. It is a really convenient way to keep track of that stuff.

6. Buy an extra of anything that might turn into a favorite thing (blanket, stuffed animal, etc…)  The extra $20 will save you an enormous heartache on the day the stuffed animal gets left in a hotel room.  Seriously there is no crisis like it :-)

7. Sleep when they sleep.  Boy I miss the naps.

8. They grow up fast.  I figure I have 7-8 years to bond with my kids before they become swept up in a zillion other activities and I am no longer their favorite playmate.

9. Enjoy that you aren’t alone in this.  When you are losing your mind, hand the baby to someone else. It is normal to go a little crazy with the crying, diapers, stress, etc..  Don’t be a hero.  This is actually great advice when they get bigger too.  My wife and I have a safe word to indicate that one of us has reached our limit and the other one should take over.  10 or 20 minutes later you will love that you didn’t start screaming at the kids :-)

youmeandmyapi:

17%

That was the effective tax rate paid by the 400 Americans with the highest adjusted gross income in 2007, the most recent year with IRS data available. The figure is down from almost 30 percent in 2005. All in all, this April 15 could be the best tax day for the wealthy since the early 1930s - with top rates on ordinary income, capital gains, dividends, estates and gifts at or near historic lows.

This is unsustainable - that’s all I know. It just invites massive and for capitalism, problematic backlash. The rich need to get in front of this, because government cannot.

Not sure how to fix this.  But I don’t think it is limited to the richest 400 Americans. I don’t want America to turn into a 3rd world country where there are super rich and everyone else.  I also don’t want something in between.  Our country will only start to grow again when we take Ford’s advice: He wanted every worker in his company to earn enough to buy the product they were building.  It can’t be that to feed and house your family you need 2 adults with 2 full time jobs each. Where is the joy in that?

One of my SaneBox engineers (no names to protect the guilty) just sent me this quote:

Every Program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

Those programs that cannot so expand are replaced by ones that can.

— Third Law of Software Envelopment

Hmmm… I’m thinking this is a little push back on the latest round of production tickets.  

Maybe it’s time to do some self-reflection?

Has my professional transition gone astray?

For many years, I was the CTO/Founder where I saw my job as being the balanced voice of reason in emotional conversations about new product features.  My current position is President/Founder/CTO/customer service exec/chief bottle washer/chief evangelist.  What would old-me think of new-me?

For those in-the-know, this is all about added functionality to http://sanebox.com new email digest that gets delivered directly to your INBOX and allows you to live in your immaculately clean INBOX and continue to efficiently stay on top of all your email.  No other SaneBox feature has elicited such an emotional upsurge in “love letters” from users and requests for enhancements.

Anybody want to side with old-me?  I think that guy was a kill-joy.  I’m thinking of going into flickr and drawing virtual mustaches on all his pictures.

This chart shows where I am in relationship to the current world of SaneBox.  The yellow line is the total emails received by each user this week.  The green line is the total important emails received by each user this week. I am about 65% of the way up the base of the true power user email cliff. 

We will add to this chart in the future but for now it is meant to put your pain in perspective. So before I whine about how much email I get, I will consider the user at the peak who gets an average of 259 emails a day. They must be pretty happy to use SaneBox: 136 of those emails each day just aren’t that important and get automatically filed from their INBOX to their SaneLater folder. And they get a digest each day of the 136 so they can quickly and easily see if they want to override us and promote some of them to their INBOX after all.

I have an old friend who has always had trouble keeping up with his email.  Let’s call him FooBar. FooBar get’s a **lot** of email. And it was his email woes, in addition to that of other friends, that caused me to create http://sanebox.com.  

No I’m not going to mention FooBar by name.  He is a good guy with this one little foible: he thinks every single email might be crucial to his life.

To understand this story you have to know that SaneBox makes decisions about what is “important” email and what is “unimportant” email.  This is a GTD type decision based on what needs your attention right now versus what can wait.  And SaneBox has layers of importance so we distinguish things that can wait a little with things that can wait a longer while.

SaneBox moves the “unimportant” emails automatically out of your INBOX to your SaneLater folder.

FooBar can’t admit that focusing and keeping up with the important stuff is worth letting one email wait a couple of hours.  And this is The Problem.

SaneBox users are supposed to scan their “unimportant” email at least once a day to make sure that a timely issue hasn’t slipped in there.  We can send a digest to your INBOX once or several times a day to make that triage easier. But, you still have to admit to yourself that it is OK if something out-of-the-blue from someone-you-have-no-real-connection-to comes in and waits a few hours until you have time to notice it.

I find that the everything-is-important people are often the leave-email-in-their-INBOX people. They use the read flag to indicate that they already triaged that particular email. THIS IS CRAZY and will lead to email INSANITY. Touch your email as few times as possible.  If you’ve opened it and you can deal with it, deal with it (read,forward,reply and then defer,delete,archive,file).  GET IT OUT OF YOUR INBOX!  

There is the occasional email that will take more time than you have now. SaneBox has defer folders for this. You put the email in one of our defer folders and it disappears from your INBOX until the time you have specified.  Whenever you read an email and leave it in your INBOX it forces you to scroll passed it every single time you look in your INBOX.  And let’s be honest you look there A LOT.

So, this is a public plee to my email challenged friends and all those out there that are everything-is-important people (especially FooBar). Please acknowledge that you are only human and some things deserve your attention right now and some things don’t.  Go sign up for http://SaneBox.com.

For those that have been living under a rock…

SaneBox and Priority Inbox distinguish between important email and email that can wait.  

First, make no mistake, SaneBox is better than Priority Inbox.

Because SaneBox…

1. Automatically files the unimportant stuff out of your INBOX so it doesn’t constantly distract you. 
2. Requires no training to be effective.
3. Is more accurate  
4. Has great customer service
5. Has 4-5 levels of importance
6. Can defer an email for future processing
7. Can Blackhole an email
8. Can auto-file old emails
9. Can monitor your SPAM folder for important stuff
10. Can report on your email trends
11. Can link to your social networks for increased accuracy

But, the general concept is the same.

Oh yeah, Google’s Priority Inbox is free and SaneBox costs actual money (about the price of a latte a month).

Oh wait… there is one more difference… Google’s Priority Inbox ONLY works with Google’s Gmail

and SaneBox now works with ANY EMAIL SERVER!

SaneBox now works with Gmail, Yahoo!, Mobile Me, AOL, MS Exchange, or any other service you can think of. Ummm… except Hotmail and Earthlink (don’t ask).

What’s your wasted time and email frustration worth each month?

We at SaneBox say enough to perpetual presidents, monarchies, walled garden email providers.  Free your email. Free your spirit.  Think of this as the first wave of an email revolution.  

Hmmm… Does Google’s new, free, bundled Smart Labels product seem to mimic functionality from my product SaneBox? Yes.

Am I going to wander into traffic because Google seems to be slow-copying my product? Absolutely not.  

SaneBox is still easier to use, more accurate, and more fully featured than PI and Smart Labels.  And SaneBox will be better yet 4-6 months in the future when Google gets around to copying what we have now.

I’m kind of bemused that it seems to take the multibillion multinational publicly traded company 4-6 months to badly copy and field my latest features.  Based on that, I guess I should give my small team a raise :-)

How can a tiny boot-strapped company like SaneBox win when competing with Google?

We will win because we will provide real honest and personal customer service and a better product that people will be happy to pay for.

We will win because we will make sure that every 6 months there will be something more for Google to copy.

We will win because users want choice.  Priority Inbox has been out there for 6 months.  It’s free.  It’s bundled.  And it doesn’t stop users from choosing to pay for SaneBox.  Users want choice.  And those that can afford it, want the best product available.

Just yesterday, Nate Berkopec tweeted:

“Just paid for @sanebox. $5/month for email sanity is a small, small price to pay.”

We will win because everyone needs email sanity. 

In the end, gmail will keep trying to copy us and we will keep innovating. But, I will never give up on gmail because I like the challenge and I love my gmail users.

And for those that worry needlessly, SaneBox will be available on every single non-gmail email distribution platform soooooon :-)

This will only be interesting to people with toddlers or that know other people with toddlers.  Sorry to everyone else.  But I wish I had known all this 1 year ago. 

My 5yo daughter has had a stomach ache of varying intensities for a year now.  We have been to the doctors, to the emergency room twice.  They have taken x-rays and probed her and investigated.  They invariably described her condition as “constipation”.  It was never quite to the point of a blockage. Just that she was “backed up”.  They gave us Miralax to take every day.  They told us this is very common. They kind of made it seem as if we were bad parents that we hadn’t been giving her a laxative all along. As if it made lots of common sense that we should guess that a child that never was “actually” constipated needed prophylactic laxatives.

The laxative made the problem better sometimes but never made it go away and forced my daughter (and us) to spend a an enormous amount of time in the bathroom.  I’m going to blog someday about how my friends that were sooooo persuasive that child rearing was the most fulfilling activity never mentioned exactly how much time you spend in the bathroom.

Two days ago, in a moment of pure serendipity, I decided to see if maybe she was having a bad reaction to dairy.  This caused some ranting and raving.  It meant no more pizza, milk, cheese on pasta, mac & cheese, well… anything with cheese.  My daughter was UNHAPPY. But, in a fit of daddy firmness I prevailed.

Two days later, she is 99.99% better.  Seriously.  One year of heart-rending middle of the night sobbing about her stomach.  One year of emergency room visits and everything that goes with it. All we had to do was cut out the dairy.

Please pass this along to other parents and their pediatricians. I wish someone had suggested this to me.

Today we fielded a new optional folder called SaneArchive. This option keeps the total count of Sane folder emails to a maximum of 5000.  The 5001st oldest email will automatically be filed into the SaneArchive folder.

We’ve discovered that as we get better and better at separating the unimportant email into SaneLater, our users spend less and less time processing (filing,deleting) those emails.  So the number in that folder simply grows and grows.

We have always labeled the most recent 5000 emails.  So when we see the 5001st email, we will unlabel the oldest one, put it back into the INBOX, to bring the total under our quota.

SaneArchive, when active, will act as a repository for these oldest emails.  So, instead of putting the old ones back in the INBOX, we will put them in SaneArchive.

We could simply “archive” them in gmail, but then we would not be able to reverse the process if you should decide you hate the folder or our service. If you turn SaneArchive  “off”, we  simply return it’s emails to your INBOX.  If you “cancel” the SaneBox service, we simply return all Sane folder emails, including the SaneArchive folder emails, back to your INBOX.  In either case, your INBOX looks just like it did before you clicked.

If you want to force an old email to stay in your INBOX: simply “flag” or “star” it.