On an average I get more than 200 emails a day. I have signed up for about half a dozen online magazines, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. The result is that I have an unmanageable amount of emails through which I have to wade through daily to separate out the ones I really need to give my attention to. In the process I often miss out on important emails. The chaos in my life almost made me give up. Then I signed in for Sanebox and sanity prevailed.

It is like having a full time assistant who sorts my email into five important and unimportant folders, prods me when a follow-up email is needed and gives me a summary report at the end of the day. So what is this Sanebox? In short it is an email filtering program that uses an algorithm to analyse incoming email messages and places them into different folders.

Once you sign up you have to train your inbox. You can see all your trainings and adjust them. It is easier, quicker and more powerful than building your own custom filters or email rules. Sanebox scans your inbox headers and moves unimportant messages to the @SaneLater folder using its own smart filtering algorithms combined with your personal training. If you add your social networks it will prioritise emails from people you follow on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It also recognises the difference between personal and corporate or bulk email coming from the same domain. You can always move an email @SaneLater to the inbox and these trainings will be remembered for all emails from the same address. The contact training can be adjusted via the SaneBox setting page.

SaneRemindMe helps to follow up on emails that you have not replied to. And if you want to get rid of emails from unwanted senders forever you can just move them to SaneBlackHole which ensures that that particular sender will never see your inbox again. You don’t have to go through the tedious process of unsubscribing.

Google tried to solve the problem by introducing Priority Inbox. It is helpful but I prefer Sanebox. Otherinbox also offers a free Organiser feature that sorts receipts, newsletters and social media emails into folders. But it takes a long time to search through emails and creates a lot of folders, which adds to the clutter. Another player in the space is the paid service AwayFind. But it, too, only gets your top priority mail.

The main competitors for SaneBox are Symantec Email Anti Spam Cloud, Spam Titan and McAfee SaaS Email Protection System. All three programs save you time and increase your productivity level by filtering out over 99 per cent of unwanted mail so that you do not have to waste your time sorting spam. They feature predictive technology designed to catch new threats. But they do not adapt to connect to your social networking sites, do not have a permanent unsubscribe feature, do not remind you to follow up on emails and do not defer an email until you are ready for it.

SaneBox on the other hand works almost like artificial intelligence. It gets smarter the more you use it. However it does not provide anti-virus protection. You also do not have offline access to your email.

While defending my Gmail account from social networks and bad PR lobbying, SaneBox noticed that I had received a very vague email from Microsoft. It wasn’t from an account that I hear from often, I have never responded to it. After all, Microsoft is not a person. SaneBox put it in the side folder. That email was an invitation to a very special event. I missed it. Well, that is just one downside.

After a free trial, SaneBox users pay up to $5 a month for the service. Sanebox also has a dropbox-like referral program with which you can earn $5 credit if a friend signs up. So it is possible to get SaneBox for free forever? Here’s how. Your first 30 days are free. Then you invite a friend to sign up for SaneBox either using the invitation page or sending him a special invitation link. If he signs up, you automatically get another free 30 days of SaneBox. So you can sign up 11 friends this year and get Sanebox for free for the whole year.

Send in your computer-related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com with bits&bytes in the subject line