Sanebox review: Recover your email sanity

Sanebox $6.00 Sanebox has added new features, and remains a (mostly)useful tool for restoring sanity to the craziest of inboxes.

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Sanebox has grown up since I first reviewed it a year and a half ago, adding some new features that (mostly) impressed me. It’s suffering from a few growing pains, but it remains one of the few email services that lives up to its promise of saving you time by bringing order to your inbox.

Sanebox automatically
creates folders and
delivers some messages
directly to them,
bypassing your inbox.

The cloud-based Sanebox works with any IMAP-based email service. You simply enter your email address on their site and give the service permission to access your account. It then goes to work analyzing the contents of your inbox. You can connect social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in order to give Sanebox more information on which to base its decisions.

Those decisions are about which emails you need to see now versus those that can wait until you're ready to deal with them. And Sanebox does a remarkably good job of determining that: It whittled my Gmail inbox down to 86 unread messages. Impressive, especially when you consider that it started with nearly 1,000 unread items. Sanebox doesn’t delete emails, but simply organizes them into folders it creates, called “SaneArchive,” “SaneCC” (currently in beta), “SaneLater,” and “SaneNews.”

Sanebox’s daily digest shows you the messages that bypassed your inbox.

Once the service is activated, messages that belong in those folders are delivered right into those folders, rather than cluttering up your inbox. And Sanebox alerts you with a daily digest message so you can see which messages you may have missed and allows you to train the service, so that it will deliver future messages into the right place. You also can check these folders at any time to make sure you’re not missing anything important.

And in the case of the SaneCC folder, you might have to. This feature, new since I last tested Sanebox, is designed to filter out messages in which your address is not listed in the “to” line. The reasoning is sound: if you’re listed in the “CC” or “BCC” line, then chances are the email is more “FYI than actionable,” Sanebox says.

But in practice, it didn’t work as well. Friends and colleagues of mine often use email for group conversations, and in many of the replies, I was listed on the CC line. I thought I was missing out on messages until I realized that these messages were going into my SaneCC folder. Unfortunately, since it was a beta feature, I couldn't turn it off. The company promises that when this feature rolls out to everyone, it will have that toggle.

Attachments are automatically removed from your messages, and replaced with a link.

More impressive was the new Sane Attachments feature, which allows you to control whether attachments land in—and therefore clog up—your inbox. This feature, which can easily be turned on or off using Sanebox’s Web page, lets you decide whether to remove attachments of a certain size from incoming messages, and have them sent directly to Dropbox, box, or IBM Smartcloud. (Users of other cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, are out of luck for now.) Instead of an attachment, you see a link to the cloud storage service. Sane Attachments not only saves your inbox from oversized files, but it also provides an easy way to sync important files directly to your storage service.

I’m still impressed by Sanebox and the amount of time it saves me when using email. I'm reserving judgement on SaneCC until I see that feature leave beta.

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Review: Upload files to Dropbox via email with Send to Dropbox

If you’re looking for a simpler way to send content directly to Dropbox, Send to Dropbox has you covered. This free service generates an email address, and any attachments sent to that address are automatically saved to Dropbox.

The free version of Send to Dropbox doesn’t allow you to create a custom address.

Getting started with Send to Dropbox is a breeze: You just connect it to your Dropbox account and it instantly generates an email address for you. Remembering this may be a challenge, though. My address contained a short but random string of numbers and letters.

Upgrading to the $29-per-year Pro account gives you the option of customizing your email address, which is a nice feature for business users, especially those who may want to share the address with colleagues. The Pro account also lets you create multiple addresses, and an email whitelist, so you can control who can send files to your Dropbox.

By default, Send to Dropbox saves your files to a new folder it creates in your Dropbox called “Apps/Attachments.” You can change this filename and add subfolders that contain the name of the sender and the subject line, if you prefer. However, you can’t share this folder with other Dropbox users, as it is a special type of folder for Dropbox applications.

By default, Send to Dropbox saves files to a folder it creates, but you can create subfolders in there, if you’d like.

In my tests, all of the attachments sent to my Send to Dropbox address appeared in Dropbox almost instantly, and were organized in the folders I’d selected. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to send files to Dropbox, Send to Dropbox can’t be beat.

Liane Cassavoy is a veteran technology and business journalist. She contributes regularly to PCWorld and has written about business issues and products for Entrepreneur Magazine and other publications. She is the author of two business start-up guides published by Entrepreneur Press.
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Review: Cloze prioritizes email by strength of relationship

Cloze Cloze offers interesting insights into some of your most important online relationships, but its value as an inbox tamer is limited.

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Cloze is supposed to help you deal with inbox overload, but I have to admit that this free service initially made me a bit anxious. After using it for a while, though, I came to appreciate its relationship-centered approach to email and social networking.

Somehow, an overall of Cloze score of 47 didn't seem very impressive.

This Web service reduces the noise and clutter of messaging overload by focusing on your relationships with correspondents. It doesn't stop at email, either: Cloze works with the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter social networks as well. When you connect an account to Cloze, it pulls in all of the communications you've had with your contacts, and then presents your email messages to you arranged by contact—and their presumed importance to you—not by the medium from which the communication hails.

Cloze delivers your messages in a daily digest, but you can also access them anytime from the Web app or the iOS app…and it was the Web app that that caused my first pangs of anxiety. They were caused by my overall Cloze score, which was 47 out of 100. Cloze tells you that your Cloze scores is a measure of your relationship quality, with a score of 70 indicating a very strong relationship over time.

Thanks to this dispiriting number, I began using Cloze already feeling as though I had a lot of catching up to do. I felt better when I saw that Cloze rated my individual relationships much higher, and I like how it breaks down these relationships by the day, so you can see how they change over time. By default, Cloze identifies 25 key people as "the people you need to keep an eye on," which is based on the strength of your relationship with them across your various platforms. And this was where I felt Cloze stumbled a bit.

Cloze offers a terrific amount of detail on the people you contact most frequently.

It rated some folks as very high, simply because I was in contact with them frequently, but not because the quality of the correspondence was high. For example, the secretary at my children's school was listed as a key person for me. She emails often, as she is responsible for sending home all updates to the families at the school. But I rarely respond, and am not in contact with her on any social network, and while the messages she sends are valuable, I would not consider her a key contact.

Luckily, Cloze lets you add and remove contacts from this list of key people, and I like all of the details it offers on the folks you're in touch with. It rates not only the overall relationship with a contact, but also the frequency, dormancy, responsiveness, privacy, freshness, and balance that the relationship has—based on your online interactions, of course.

Cloze on the iPhone delivers a great experience for keeping up with messages and contacts.

It also shows you recent messages and related people, all of which would be very helpful to a businessperson looking to cultivate a relationship. But it can't measure the quality of your offline relationship, so if you're frequently texting, talking on the phone, or seeing each other in person, your relationship is likely much stronger than Cloze realizes.

Its mobile companion was far more useful for keeping up with my messages, though. Browsing your email on the small screen of an iPhone or with the less-than-perfect email client installed on the iPad can be frustrating, so I liked using Cloze's mobile app instead of default clients on my iOS devices.

Overall, I didn't find Cloze a true tool for eliminating email overload, especially when using the Web app. On iOS, Cloze made it easier to find messages and other correspondence from the folks I wanted to hear from, and offered plenty of options for browsing my messages. But on my desktop, I'll stick to my regular old email client for navigating my inbox, and will turn to Cloze only when I'm ready to take a look at where some of my key relationships stand.

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How to Stop Push Email on Your iPhone

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Review: Postbox is a slick, affordable desktop email client that plays nice with Gmail

If you're after a desktop email client that isn't Outlook, you may discover you don't have very many options. Mozilla Thunderbird is no longer actively developed; Eudora is a distant memory; The Bat! is still around, but costs $35 (or $45 for the Professional edition). One of the more appealing options available is Postbox, a slick, modern-looking desktop email client that plays nice with Gmail and will set you back just $10 after the 30-day free trial.

With all panes shown, the Postbox interface feels powerful almost to the point of being overwhelming.

Postbox v3.0.7 is actually based on Thunderbird: If you go to Tools > Options, you'll find a very familiar looking Options dialog. The rest of the interface, however, looks different. Gone is the traditional horizontally-split layout, replaced by a vertical split that puts your message headers on the left, with the message body on the right, much like the Gmail Offline Chrome extension. You can still bring the Classic View back, though.

By default, the leftmost part of the window is populated by a nested list of folders based on your Gmail labels. Almost all of my labels synced correctly, except for one: the Bulk label, which I automatically filter incoming "gray mail" into. That label never made it all the way to Postbox due to a configuration error on my Gmail account: I had to make it available via IMAP (as all other labels were set), after which it synced to Postbox without a hitch.

In the past, each email was its own little island of text. Modern clients such as Gmail changed this by showing threaded conversations, which cleverly group related emails into one cohesive view. Postbox uses the same concept, and adds a few desktop interface niceties such as being able to pop open the conversation and access a specific email directly from the list of message headers.

Postbox makes it easy to individually collapse every pane, so that you can end up with a minimalistic list of conversations if you prefer.

As much as Postbox strives to play nice with Gmail, some of the visual differences are disorienting: For example, the message list shows senders' names in bold, even for messages you've already read. The "unread" marker is a small blue dot, quite elegant, but not as obvious as bold/non-bold text. There is a way to change this, but only by manually editing the configuration (or switching to the Classic, horizontally-split, view). Another point that kept me from seriously using Postbox is the lack of support for RTL languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic. If you write even the occasional email in such a language, Postbox is out of the question.

One of the challenges of managing email is quickly getting to the messages you care about within a cluttered folder. Gmail lets you do this with blazing-fast searches and clever operators like "is:unread." Postbox offers a more visual way, in the form of the Focus Pane. This collapsible pane lets you quickly slice and dice the current folder: Show only unread messages, show only messages that have attachments, only messages from today, yesterday, the past week, or the past month, and more. Postbox even lets you assign "topics" to your emails, which are another layer of classification, distinct from labels. You can assign any email to a topic such as Work, Home, or Personal. The Focus Bar lets you quickly filter these, as well.

With the folder pane, the focus pane, the vertical conversations list, and the email preview pane, the Postbox interface feels busy. Fortunately, Postbox allows you to eliminate the folder pane by setting up a handful of favorite folders, which you can then access via a toolbar at the top of the window. You can also collapse and expand the focus pane with a single click, and even hide the email preview pane, so that you're left with just a minimalistic list of message headers.

Threaded conversations, familiar to every Gmail user, are fully supported in Postbox.

Postbox isn't perfect, but then again, the same can be said about email itself as a communication medium. Still, if you're not happy with Gmail's browser interface and yearn for the comfort of the desktop clients of yore, you would do well to try it out. Be sure to allow for an adjustment period. Slick as it may be, it's still an acquired taste.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Beat the FBI: How to Send Anonymous Email Without Getting Caught

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Rein in your inbox and schedule email reminders with Right Inbox

Send an email sometime on the weekend, and by the time Monday rolls around, it will be buried under a pile of other emails crowding your recipient's inbox. But what if you don't have time to send the email at just the right moment for it to be seen? If you're using Gmail, Right Inbox can do that for you. This service ($5/month or $39/year, free feature-limited demo) can also track sent emails and report when the recipient opened them, and remind you about emails that haven't received a reply so you can follow up.

Right Inbox shows up as a set of buttons on the email composition screen.No aspect of Right Inbox is really unique: ActiveInbox has been offering a browser add-on for managing Gmail more efficiently; Boomerang is another add-on that offers remarkably similar functionality. And then there are Followup.cc and FollowupThen, two services that provide follow-up reminders without any add-ons--you simply CC the service when sending the email. Finally, Google published its own way to create your own reminders using Google Docs and some scripting. But Right Inbox is more focused than ActiveInbox, better-priced than Boomerang (which costs $15 per month for Google Apps users), can do things the two follow-up services simply can't, and doesn't require any coding skills to set up.

Right Inbox comes as a browser add-on for Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. It blends into Gmail so seamlessly you may have trouble finding it at first. There is no control panel, and nothing to configure. Unlike ActiveInbox, it doesn't create lots of new labels within Gmail. It simply shows up as a few new buttons in the email composition screen, and one new button in the message reading screen.

You can use Right Inbox to snooze an email you received until it's time to handle it.When composing a new email, you can now click the Send Later button and specify when you want that email sent. While waiting to be sent, the email is stored in your Drafts folder, so you can still edit it. You can also tick the Track checkbox, which will embed a tiny invisible image into the email, and will let you know when your recipient opened the message (assuming he opted to display images you send). Finally, the Remind Me button lets you push the email into your own Inbox after some time, star it, label it as a Reminder, and even mark it as unread. You can have Right Inbox do all of this only if the recipient doesn't reply to the message, so you're not flooded with unneeded follow-up reminders.

The Remind Me button is the one that also shows up in the message reading screen: You can use it to snooze threads that don't require immediate action or are awaiting other information, and have them come back to your inbox when the time is right. This is also the only part of Right Inbox that gave me any trouble: The button wouldn't always show up, and I had to refresh Chrome every now and then to get it to display.

Right Inbox gets a lot right: The interface is simple and well-integrated, and the price is reasonable. If you're a Gmail or Google Apps user looking for an email scheduling and tracking solution, you should try it out.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download use latest version of the software on your Gmail or Google Apps account running in a supported browser.

—Erez Zukerman

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Email Encryption Made Free and Easy With Enlocked

Like many people, I rely heavily on email to communicate with all sorts of folks. And sometimes, whether it's sending tax information to my husband or credit card information to the owner of an inn, that communication is sensitive. That's why I was intrigued by Enlocked (free beta), an email encryption service that's designed to take the complications out of complex encryption software. And it succeeds, to a certain extent.

Enlocked adds a "Send Secured" button to your email client, allowing you to encrypt messages with a single click.Enlocked is available as a free plugin for the Outlook email client; Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers; and Android and iOS mobile devices. I tested the IE plug-in. Once you download and install the appropriate plugin, Enlocked adds a new button to your email options: "Send Secured." I tested it using Gmail and Hotmail on Firefox and Internet Explorer, and found the Send Secured button easy to identify--when it appeared, that is. When using a Gmail account in IE, I discovered that the button didn't appear until I began typing an address into the "To" field, but it remained constant in a Hotmail account in the same browser. I also found that, on two separate occasions, the button disappeared completely, and didn't show up again until I reinstalled the plugin entirely. Enlocked is still in beta, so I'm hoping the company improves its stability before the final version is released.

Before you send your first encrypted email, Enlocked will ask you to enter you email password. This is done to authenticate the user, and the message only appears the first time you use the service. Once you click "Send Secured," emails are sent just as any other message would be. If the recipient has never before received an message that's been encrypted with Enlocked, they will receive a notification message before the encrypted message arrives. This message lets them know that, in order to read the encrypted message, they will need to download the free plugin and offers handy links to do so. (If their mail client and/or browser is not supported, or if they simply prefer not to download anything, Enlocked does offer a browser-based version, called Enlocked Anywhere, which allows messages to be read in a Web browser.)

If the recipient has downloaded and installed the Enlocked plugin by the time the message arrives, they'll be asked to enter their email password upon opening the message. This authenticates the user, and only happens upon receiving the first encrypted message. The contents of the message are then automatically decrypted.

If the user hasn't already installed Enlocked, the encrypted message arrives with three attachments and no actual content viewable, other than a note from Enlocked telling them that the contents have been encrypted. If you don't install Enlocked, none of the attachments will open. This is done to protect the contents, as the encrypted information needs to be decrypted in order to be readable, but I can see how this could stymie some recipients who might not be familiar with encryption and browser plug-ins. But taking the time to notify your recipients of these details before sending them the message should alleviate the problem. And, for users who don't want to download and install any plugins, Enlocked offers a browser-based service that will allow them to read their encrypted messages.

Enlocked was still a bit buggy when used with a Gmail account on IE, but that should improve. And while Enlocked may not be drop-dead simple, it is encryption made easy. That's while I'll keep using it when I need to make sure the contents of my emails are safe from prying eyes.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

-- Liane Cassavoy

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