A new email trick with SaneBox, Spark, and OmniFocus
I’ve used SaneBox happily for a couple of years now. It’s a tool that automatically sorts your inbox, filtering out things you can read later, newsletters, bulk emails, and more, leaving your inbox with only the emails that actually matter. You can train it by moving emails from your inbox to special folders, and after a couple of weeks it will have your inbox neat and tidy.
I’ve also been using Spark on iOS as my email client. I love its configurability, and it works perfectly with my existing system, providing parity with my email habits on my Mac.
A new feature that SaneBox added recently, SaneFwd, lets you set up custom folders that automatically forward emails to one or more addresses. I was excited because now I could use a “move to folder” shortcut to send emails to my OmniFocus mail drop. When the SaneFwd feature first launched it lacked the OmniFocus domain, so I requested it and was just informed that it’s been added.
This makes it easy for me to add OmniFocus capabilities to Spark, which it’s currently lacking. I created a folder called @OmniFocus that forwards to my sync.omnifocus.com address. By customizing a swipe gesture in Spark settings, I can now do a long swipe to the left to move an email to my custom SaneFwd folder, automatically creating a task for it in OmniFocus.
I highly recommend SaneBox, so here’s my affiliate link if you want to check it out. I also think Spark is the best iOS email client, having tried them all (I think). Here’s Macworld’s review, and you can get Spark on the App Store.