Unless you use a service like SaneBox.
SaneBox is similar to Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature in that it looks at your messages and prior history engaging with those senders and decides which emails you’re likely to deem most important.
When you turn on the Priority Inbox feature in Gmail, Google separates your email into three categories: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything Else; all the mail is still in your inbox, but the important messages are up top.
How Does SaneBox Work?
SaneBox is a little different in that it removes less important messages from your inbox completely, moving them to an @SaneLater folder that you can peruse whenever you want. If SaneBox puts an important message into that folder you can move it to your inbox and it remembers the action so the next time you receive a message from that person, it will go to your inbox.
Gmail’s Priority Inbox is trainable in this way, as well; the more you move stuff around, the better it gets at categorization. SaneBox just makes it all easier
SaneBox gives you a custom dashboard including a timeline that graphs how many important and less important emails you get every day. I set this up on my AOL account and found that my current average, according to SaneBox, is 81 a day. If I took a minute to read, digest, and respond to each one of them, that’s nearly an hour and a half a day just going through my email. If you figure there’s at least 250 work days in a year, I could be spending 375 hours per year on email. That’s a lot of lost productive time.
In addition to the @SaneLater folder that stores non-essential messages, you can also enable folders such as @SaneNews for newsletters and @SaneBlackHole for those messages you want to send straight to your Trash. (now you’re able to “unsubscribe” without notifying the world that your email address is live and saleable)
Automated nagging!
SaneBox also has a nifty feature that lets you CC or BCC a message to @SaneBox.com to remind you if someone doesn’t respond.
So let’s say you need an answer from your boss about a project and you need it no later than two days from now. In the CC field just include the address 2days@SaneBox.com and in two days SaneBox will put the message back in the top of your inbox if your boss never replied to it. This way you remember to bug him/her again.
SaneBox also creates an @SaneRemindMe folder that lets you keep track of all the messages to which you still need replies. Use oneweek@SaneBox.com, June5@SaneBox.com or 5minutes@SaneBox.com; it doesn’t matter, SaneBox will figure out the time frame you need and remind you accordingly.
The service is $5 a month and works with email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, iPhone, and Android and as well most email services like Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail. The only service it doesn’t currently support is Hotmail.
Give SaneBox a try by signing up for their 14 day free trial – no credit card info necessary and it only takes 30 seconds.
Visit the website to learn more and take a video tour.
http://www.sanebox.com
