Stuart Roseman

My Thanksgiving day wish

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:09:59 -0500

It being the day before Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought it appropriate to be a little thankful.

I have a lot to be thankful for: wonderful wife, http://danielacorte.com, two wonderful kids. And we are all warm, dry, well fed, employed, and happy. That in itself isn’t too shabby these days.

But this Thanksgiving, I’d like to sing the praises of my mother-in-law, Linda

My wife and I have always been able to take a kid-less holiday or gracefully take care of a work emergency. We’ve never had to worry about my daughter or son having a moment of discomfort because we can always rely on Linda.

My wife has infinite faith because she has a lifetime of evidence. I have infinite faith because the worst that could happen is that Linda will turn my kids into copies of my wife. And, frankly, I spend some part of each day hoping she will.

My kids loooooove their grand-mother. They think she walks on water. Not because she gives them more ice cream than we do (she does). Not because she lets them watch TV more than we do (she does). But, because they never doubt for a second that she would walk into a burning house for them (she would). And because she is firm, fair, thoughtful, just, patient, funny, fun, helpful, smart, and omniscient.

And my kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. If I need a dinner reservation, I first mention my wife and if that doesn’t work I drop my mother-in-law’s name. Really… everyone loves Linda and they should.

Recently, one my engineers went away for his first kid-less night away with his wife in five years. He and his wife seem to have a great relationship. And, certainly, they were doing just fine with the previous 1,825 kid-filled days.

But, wow did it sound like they had a great time on their night away.

And here is the thing…

These days, life is extremely complicated and balance seems to be a luxury. It is a luxury to have time off alone with your wife. It is a luxury to be able to concentrate on your new business in the midst of daily chaos. It is a luxury to spend time playing with your kids. I don’t take these luxuries for granted. And I attribute our ability to juggle all this and find some sort of balance to Linda.

And my Thanksgiving day wish is that you all find your own Lindas and the balance that she brings.

Zawinski's Law

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:23:40 -0500

You know it’s been a tough day when one of your engineers quotes Zawinski’s law of software development:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

And yes I did point out that we (http://sanebox.com) **are** the in the email business, but in the end he was correct to Zawinski me and that is why I LOVE my engineers!

Hi Stuart, I am too a big believer in data visualization. I found your insight very useful one hand and very discouraging on the other. I tried to find your platform on GitHub and couldn't. Can you help? Thank you, Ron

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:46:59 -0500

Hi Ron,

Sorry. SaneBox has gotten an insane amount of traffic so I haven’t had the time to upload it. Adobe just announced yesterday that they weren’t going to support flash on mobile devices anymore so it is just a matter of time before flash goes the way of the dodo. Our front end graphics creator was written in flash so that really limits it’s long term usefulness. The backend part is still very powerful. At this point, I don’t know when I will have time to upload the code.

Sorry,

Stuart

Made my morning… this is the way to live your life…...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:12:00 -0400

Made my morning… this is the way to live your life… Ann Druyan is a hero… RIP Carl Sagan…

youmeandmyapi:

This may be controversial to some, but the reality is that it should encourage us to maximize what we know, rather than what may be.

cwnl:

“When my husband died, because he was so famous & known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — & ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage & never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief & precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.

Every single moment that we were alive & we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous & so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space & the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me & it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.“

- Ann Druyan, talking about her husband, Carl Sagan

Lyme

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:39:00 -0400

I have a friend who has lost the ability to raise his arms through the ravaging effects of Lyme disease. He has been actively treating it for last year and after 6 months he started getting better. But the progress is slow, painful, soul-crushing.

That would be awful enough, but he had medical insurance and sought medical advice and was told for years previous to his effective diagnosis and treatment of Lyme that he had an ordinary bug bite (cortisone cream), tremors in his hands (drugs to treat the symptom) and then as his symptoms progressed that he had ALS and all they could do was make him comfortable and wait for the end.

I was there when the big expert at MGH said that to him. My friend didn’t even argue with the doctor. He had already plugged into the Lyme-aware doctor network and was simply going through the main-stream medical steps.

He lives in the suburbs of Boston. Deer ticks are everywhere.

Now that he knows the symptoms, he has realized that his 17yo daughter who has been having neck pains for a year and is being treated with Percocet by her PCP might have the early signs of Lyme. He sent her to have the tests and sure enough they came back positive. His Lyme expert MD prescribed her a course of treatment.

Now for the really awful part… the PCP doesn’t want her to take the treatment and has convinced her to stop. I assume because anti-biotics have side effects - you could develop colitis.

He is now in the awful position where he has to argue with his daughter about treating a disease that almost killed him because he was so late in getting diagnosed. She obviously would much rather believe the PCP and take the Percocet. Who would want to acknowledge a life threatening disease when they can be stoned on Percocet?

Do you live in the suburbs? Or visit them? Or walk thru sand dunes?

Go read about the symptoms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Signs_and_symptoms

Treat it early on and you will be fine. Delay treatment and you run the risk of years of nerve problems, loss of motor control, and soul-crushingly slow progress.

Main-stream medicine has failed us in the identification of this disease and it’s treatment. Don’t put yourself on the treadmill to the ALS ward at the MGH where they will make you comfortable until the end. Be your own advocate. Get treated.

Goodbye to Verifiable. I mean it this time.

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:25:13 -0400

Some of you may remember my previous business, Verifiable.com, which was a cloud service that enabled users to upload data and turn it into pictures.

Verifiable.com has been running in read-only mode since I pivoted the business in February of 2010 to start SaneBox. My theory was that so long as the data on Verifable was useful and didn’t require support staff, I would leave it. And remarkably the system has run unattended for all this time; answering questions about unemployment, housing, pollution, prices, concrete production, etc…

For those interested in why I chose to pivot the business - here is my original write up on the mistakes made in that passionate car crash.

Well… in that time I have gotten 2 nibbles for the software. Both required documentation and staff to close and I couldn’t see allocating scarce infrastructure to that **small** sale when those resources were better served building SaneBox. Ahhh the joy of a small team and a laser beam focus.

But, the water shed moment has arrived.

Today, I put a ticket into our system to close down http://verifiable.com except for the homepage. We are updating all software instances to the latest version of Ubuntu and it is just too hard to worry about Verifiable anymore. Updating unique gems and such is simply a distraction that we can’t afford right now.

I’m sad. Creating Verifiable required a **lot** of passion and money and time and effort. But, it wasn’t as good an idea as SaneBox ( a pay service that saves you time by filtering your email). For the record, pivoting was the right thing to do, having a business that has lots of active users who pay for the service is way more fun.

Everyone is now talking about big data, big data, big data. So, my timing might have been a little early. But, I still don’t see the insightful visualizations that would make big data meaningful to the universe. And it was those visualizations that we wanted to bring to the universe. And those visualizations still require more skill and more experience and better tools than most people have. Each NYTimes graphic is still being generated as a one-off by highly, highly, highly skilled professionals with access to extremely expensive and proprietary data that has been laboriously cleaned.

And finally, in a world where most major Republican presidential candidates are running successfully against “science”, I find it hard to believe that the tide has changed in favor of big data or little data in any kind of mass market way.

I will try to find a quiet couple of hours to upload the Verifiable software to github. I’m not sure that anyone will find it useful, but if you want a turn-key, graphic generating, data massaging engine you will find it there.

And here is my last verifiable.com wish, that all of you within the sound of my keystrokes go and find the actual data behind some societal issue and develop a scientific opinion on it. Especially those who would vote for a presidential candidate that doesn’t believe in climate change and doesn’t believe in evolution.

And run don’t walk to http://sanebox.com - we save the average user 2 hours per week. Don’t you have something better to do than spend all that time on your email?

Some thoughts on firing employees

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:13:41 -0400

I just sat in on the firing of my fashion designer wife Daniela Corte’s latest sales/assistant this morning. Yes, it was an awful experience.

I’ve worked at companies where no one ever got fired. That was pretty awful too. Everyone knew who the bad people were and tried to avoid having them on their projects. Sometimes you got stuck and you made the best of it. But it always felt wrong. And the really great people always left because the situation was simply too frustrating.

Fast forward to today. My wife has been trying to fill a sales/assistant slot for years. She has tried

experience/expensive
young/inexpensive
some experience/still lots-o-money.

Nothing has seemed to work. In the end, it always seems as if it is easier and better to have no one sitting in that chair than the person she has hired. Which is seriously not a great option. Of course, the process does force you to streamline and automate if only to get through the day.

But, what is my wife doing wrong?

There have been 5 of them over the last 6 years. Each person lasts between 1-3 months.

What was wrong with them?

one of them was stealing
one of them was just genuinely crazy… really crazy
one of them could not keep details straight - shipments were lost, everything was a rush to the finish, there never seemed to be control
one of them was really, really bad with customers
the rest some combination of all of the above

You get the idea.

My wife has other employees that are great and have been with her forever. But this one position appears to be Murphy Brown personal assistant doomed.

And here is the new awful twist. My 4yo son and 6yo daughter spend a bunch of time in our offices. They become friends with the soon-to-be-fired employees who are regardless of their professional failings actually nice, well-meaning people. And oddly they are all good with kids.

So we now have these conversations at the dinner table. Mommy what does it mean to fire someone? Was so-and-so doing a bad job? Why? What did they do wrong?

Sigh…

Seriously, I have to put more money in my kids therapy fund. Frankly I probably have to put more in ours too. And frankly, I hope the employees have a therapy fund too.

In the end, firing someone, while a better idea than leaving a bad person in place to drag down morale, is still a failing of management. It is a sign of a broken hiring process or a broken on-boarding process, or a broken training process. But it is a failing of management and an expensive one at that.

The next candidate starts in a couple of weeks. She seems great. And every firing forces you to look yourself in the mirror and change something, fix something. I’m sure this one will be the keeper.

Have you ever experienced a hate crime?

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:39:18 -0400

In my experience, we are all different enough that someone out there hates us for that difference. My wife is latino. I’m a jew. Our best friends are gay. You get the idea.

But, for me, I have never personally had anyone shout at me or physically attack me for being jewish. I know it happens. I have read about it. But, it is always somewhere else to someone else.

Today, one of my closest friends had to face this. And I am absolutely furious.

He dropped off his husband at work and went to park the car. They have been married for as long as you can be gay and married in Massachusetts. A lot longer than most hetero married couples I know. And with a lot more positive energy and a lot less drama than most of the hetro married couples I know.

I’m sure they briefly kissed goodbye. I’ve seen the drop off. The kiss is a reassuring peck. Sometimes accompaigned by a short hug. I do the same thing with my wife. She can be leaving for the morning or a week or a minute and I get the quick kiss goodbye. I’m sure you all do the kiss goodbye. And none of us think much of it.

But, that kiss must have caught the attention of 2 guys that proceeded to follow my friend to where he was parking and start screaming “faggot” at him. This is Newbury Street in Boston at 9:30AM in the morning. It should have been safe to park a car and walk down the street. It should have been safe to drop your spouse at work.

My friend walked quickly away. I can’t imagine what that feels like.

Then, a loud crash. They had smashed the glass in his car with a bat. They sped away. They did all these things.

Life is complicated. There are the bills and the kids and the family and the friends and the job and all the other random concerns that make up adult life. But, somehow they found the time to scream “faggot” at the kindest man I know and smash the glass on his car and run off.

The Boston Police came. They took down the information. They were helpful, concerned, actively anxious to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I have no doubt they will try to catch these guys.

But, if they catch them or not, I am furious. You should be too.

My kids say the craziest things

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:20:55 -0400

background: in this story my wife is putting my 5yo daughter to sleep. My daughter shares a room with my 3yo son. They have a bunk bed.

Daughter: Mommy you should stay and sleep with me

Son (from lower bunk): She can’t. She has to sleep with daddy because they are married. You sleep with me because we are married.

Daughter: Brothers and sisters can’t get married

Son: Why? Will the police come and get us?

An homage to my guys

Wed, 25 May 2011 15:58:00 -0400

My company Sanebox is a tiny operation. There are four full time employees. Three of the Four work from home in states that are far away: JD/Michigan, Kris/Colorado, Peter/North Carolina. I work in the world wide headquarters in Boston, MA.

Each of the guys has small children and lots of important personal distractions. And this week Peter and Kris are moving. On the stress-o-meter, moving is I think top 5. Everything you need and/or hold dear is in flux. That includes spouse, children, pets, really everything. Kris is actually driving his wife and the dogs to their new home as I type this.

Here is the amazing thing. They all have stayed focused on their work until the last minute. JD and I did a software release this morning. A software release full of amazing new stuff: affiliate program, first step in social networking, fixes and speedups for the exchange version of SaneBox. And it all got done perfectly in the midst of complete personal chaos.

So, here is a slow, dramatic clap for all three of my guys. I try not to take them for granted, but seriously it is hard to avoid. They all seem too good to be true.

Sounds like time to give them a bonus.

I wrote this post in the hopes that all those employers out there will look around and see what remarkable and brilliant work is taking place in the midst of personal difficulties and give their own people the slow, dramatic clap they deserve and often don’t get.

Since it is just JD and me at the moment. I gotta go :-)

Security and Privacy at SaneBox

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 12:52:00 -0400

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.

Some parenting hints for a friend with a new baby daughter

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:01:00 -0400

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 :-)

Best tax day for rich since '30s

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:50:37 -0400

Best tax day for rich since '30s:

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?

Can you spell scope creep

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:19:40 -0400

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...

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:14:06 -0400

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.

Why some people need an email intervention

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:08:03 -0400

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.

SaneBox - Better Priority Inbox for Everyone

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:10:00 -0400

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…

Automatically files the unimportant stuff out of your INBOX so it doesn’t constantly distract you.
Requires no training to be effective.
Is more accurate
Has great customer service
Has 4-5 levels of importance
Can defer an email for future processing
Can Blackhole an email
Can auto-file old emails
Can monitor your SPAM folder for important stuff
Can report on your email trends
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.

Google's Smart Labels versus SaneBox

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:53:00 -0500

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 :-)

toddlers and stomach aches

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 11:15:43 -0500

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.

SaneArchive

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:17:00 -0500

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.