I'm proud to announce the launch of the zenbox.co beta!

I built zenbox.co to solve email overload. As an Inbox Zero geek I believe keeping a tidy inbox is essential to productivity.

Unfortunately, with the amount of email we receive, this is virtually impossible without any tools. The most successful tool to date is Google Inbox which makes a valiant attempt to help. For many people it is sufficient, but I have two main issues with it.

  1. While it does a great job organizing your email into categories, it does not actually remove them from your inbox. That means you spend brain power processing them even while knowing they are not important.
  2. Ultimately it works as a black box. In my opinion, your email inbox is too personal to ever allow a black box to control it. You need to fully understand what is happening in your inbox to effectively manage it.

For these reasons, I needed a new solution. zenbox.co uses a rule-based system to keep your inbox tidy. Currently, it supports three types of whitelist filters: Trusted Senders, Trusted Domains, and Trusted Mailing Lists. Any email you receive that does not match an entry in one of these strategies is moved from your inbox.

Trusted Senders is the list of individuals' email addresses whom you trust to send you emails. This would likely include your family, friends, and coworkers. This list is populated dynamically when you join zenbox.co. It looks at the recipients of your sent emails and adds them to the Trusted Senders list.

Trusted Domains allows you to whitelist entire domains. For example, you may work at a company with email domain 'acmecorp.com'. In this case, you may want to keep all 'acmecorp.com' emails in your inbox. You can do this by adding a Trusted Domain entry 'acmecorp.com'.

Trusted Mailing Lists are for your important mailing lists. This works especially well for Google Groups. Just add the google group email address (e.g. soccer-buddies@googlegroups.com) and all emails sent to that address will stay in your inbox.

I believe this initial set of zenbox.co strategies should cover a broad set of use cases. Would love to hear any other ideas.

Check out zenbox.co and don't hesitate to contact me with any questions @mericsson. Thanks!