Sanebox Spammed Me Link to heading

A few days ago I signed up for a Sanebox account after having my curiosity piqued from hearing David Sparks talk about it. I really enjoyed the service in the first few days. It learns from your email habits and moves unimportant messages into a folder called +sanelater. At 4pm each day I would receive an email listing eveything in the +sanelater folder in my inbox.This was great, the mail showing up in my inbox was email from people that I actually wanted to read. Everything else I could review in one swoop at the end of the day without it distracting me…

And then the the service creeped me out. I got a freaking marketing email in my inbox, not the +sanelater folder mind you, asking me to pitch Sanebox for business to my employer.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for being a SaneBox customer! > We recently rolled out SaneBox for Business to help companies combat email overload in the workplace. I noticed you work for Starbucks and would like to propose our business product for your entire company.

Who is involved in making this type of decision? If you can connect me it would be much appreciated.

Best,

Tom Smith | smith@sanebox.com “SaneBox delivers inbox zero daily.”

If you don’t want to hear from me about this again, just kindly let me know here.

I have a couple problems with this. The first one being this. If you are selling a product advertising its ability to remove noise and unimportant email (ie marketing emails) from the inbox and then send your own marketing message directly into the inbox, you are contradicting the entire purpose of your product.

The second problem is that this email is just plain creepy.

I noticed you work for Starbucks and would like to propose our business product for your entire company.

Where the hell did they get this information from and why the hell would they find sending this email an acceptable thing to do? I did not provide this information to them. It’s also inaccurate. I used to work at Starbucks. Regardless it is none of their business. I’m having some serious second thoughts about this service now and really want an explanation for this.

Update - Sanebox reached out and let me know they got my employer info from LinkedIn via the rapportive mail plugin. That is publicly available information that I put out there, but it still comes across as creepy when your not expecting it. Sanebox should also filter there own email in the same way they do that of others. For what it’s worth, I really like the service besides this issue. I plan on subscribing after the trial