Switching from SaneBox to Agentys in 2026: From Filtering to Drafting
· Alexandre Sauvageau
Thinking of switching from SaneBox to Agentys? An honest 2026 guide: why Gmail/Outlook users who need AI drafting move on from filtering-only, the one platform caveat (Agentys is Gmail/Outlook only), and what the switch actually involves.
SaneBox does filtering, and only filtering — it sorts incoming mail on any IMAP client but never writes a reply. If pricing across multiple accounts is adding up, or you want AI that drafts replies in your voice instead of just sorting them, Agentys is the move. Here is an honest look at what switching involves.
What SaneBox Actually Does (and Does Well)
SaneBox has been solving email overload since 2010, and it remains a focused, well-established pure-filtering tool. The core mechanism is elegant: SaneBox sits at the IMAP layer between your mail server and your inbox, watches which emails you open and reply to, and routes low-priority messages into a SaneLater folder before they ever hit your inbox. The algorithm is trained on your behavior, not a generic rule set — so it gets meaningfully better over the first few weeks of use. Senders you consistently ignore get quietly deprioritized. Senders you reply to within minutes get pushed to the top.
The feature set goes beyond simple filtering. SaneBlackHole permanently removes a sender from your inbox with a single drag; they never get through again unless you explicitly rescue them. SaneReminders lets you flag an email with a timestamp — if no reply arrives by that time, it resurfaces at the top of your inbox. SaneNoReplies works on the outbound side, tracking emails you sent that never received a response and surfacing them for follow-up. These are genuine productivity tools, not marketing features.
The architecture is worth appreciating: SaneBox is entirely server-side, which means it works identically in Apple Mail, Thunderbird, a phone, webmail, or any IMAP-compatible client you throw at it. There is no browser extension, no app to install, no lock-in to a specific interface. If you run email on three devices and two email clients, SaneBox works everywhere without configuration. That is a meaningful advantage over tools that require installing software or living inside a particular client.
Pricing runs from $7/month (Snack plan — one email, SaneLater and SaneBlackHole) through $12/month (Lunch — adds SaneReminders, SaneNoReplies, digest scheduling) to $36/month (Dinner — multiple email accounts, all features). Per-account pricing is sensible if you have a single inbox. It starts to sting at three accounts. Most knowledge workers who have tried SaneBox describe the same initial experience: the first month feels like someone cleaned your office. The visible inbox shrinks by 60-70 percent. Anxiety drops.
Where SaneBox Hits a Ceiling
The three situations where SaneBox users start looking elsewhere are predictable: pricing pressure across multiple accounts, a need for actual reply drafting, and tool-count fatigue.
Pricing across accounts. At the Dinner tier — the only plan that supports multiple email accounts — SaneBox costs $36/month. That is a reasonable price, but it is the same price category as tools that do substantially more. If you are paying $36/month solely for filtering and are also paying separately for an AI writing assistant, a scheduling tool, and a follow-up reminder app, the per-tool math starts to add up. McKinsey research from 2012 estimated that knowledge workers spend roughly 28 percent of the workweek on email (McKinsey Global Institute, 2012) — the professional case for consolidating tools around email is strong.
The drafting gap. SaneBox's filtering intelligence has a hard ceiling: it works on routing, not on understanding or responding. Once an email lands in your inbox as important, SaneBox's job is complete. It does not summarize what the email says, suggest how to respond, draft a reply, or learn your writing style. Every email that makes it through still requires you to read it fully, decide what to say, write the response, and send it. For a 40-email-per-day inbox, filtering might halve the emails you touch — but those 20 remaining emails still take the same time per email as before.
The interruption cost compounds this. UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully regain focus after a task interruption (Gloria Mark, *Attention Span*, 2023). Each email you open breaks your concentration. Filtering reduces how many times that happens. Drafting reduces how long each interruption lasts — and those two things together produce a qualitatively different outcome than filtering alone.
Tool consolidation. Heavy SaneBox users frequently run it alongside other tools — a separate CRM or follow-up tracker, an AI writing tool for replies, a newsletter unsubscriber. The stack adds up in both cost and friction. If the underlying goal is spending less time on email, five tools each solving one slice of the problem creates its own administrative overhead.
What Agentys Does Differently — and Where It Falls Short
Agentys is built for Gmail and Outlook users who want the filtering problem and the drafting problem solved in a single tool. The core workflow is different from SaneBox's: instead of routing emails before you see them, Agentys processes your inbox automatically, drafting replies to every email that needs a response. When you open your inbox, there are no raw, unhandled emails waiting — there are drafts, ready to review, edit, and approve.
The style-learning model is the part that makes the automatic drafts usable rather than generic. Agentys reads your sent email history — typically several hundred past messages — and builds a model of how you write: your vocabulary, your sentence length, how you address different categories of contacts, how formal your closings are with clients versus colleagues, which phrases you use to soften a no versus which you use to confirm a yes. Drafts written from this model sound like you wrote them under a tight deadline, not like a generic AI template. Per-contact adaptation means the tone shifts based on your history with each individual recipient.
Priority sorting operates alongside drafting. Incoming emails are classified as urgent, normal, or low priority, so even before you review the drafts, you know which conversations need attention today versus which can wait until the afternoon.
The honest limitation: Gmail and Outlook only. Agentys does not work with Apple Mail, Fastmail, ProtonMail, Yahoo Mail, or any custom IMAP mailbox. The automatic processing pipeline requires deep API access to Gmail and Microsoft 365 — access that the IMAP protocol alone does not provide. If your organization runs on anything other than Gmail or Outlook, Agentys is simply not an option at this time. SaneBox's server-side IMAP approach means it works everywhere; Agentys's API-native approach means better drafting on Gmail and Outlook, but no support outside those two platforms.
Pricing is $16.99/month for the Starter plan and $29.99/month for Professional ($24.99/month billed annually). There is a 7-day free trial. Disclosure: this article is published by Agentys.
What Switching Actually Involves
If you decide to move from SaneBox to Agentys, the practical steps are straightforward. Connect your Gmail or Outlook account to Agentys — this takes about five minutes and does not require changing your email address, your client, or how mail is routed to you. Agentys reads your sent mail history (you can set a look-back window; 90 days is the recommended starting point) and builds the initial style profile. The first automatic processing run typically yields 30-50 drafts depending on your inbox volume, though the quality improves noticeably over the first week as the model calibrates.
You do not need to cancel SaneBox immediately. Running both tools in parallel is a legitimate transition strategy: SaneBox continues filtering inbound noise while Agentys handles the drafts for emails that make it through. Some users run this dual setup for a month before deciding whether to cancel SaneBox's subscription; others find Agentys's built-in priority sorting sufficient and drop SaneBox within the first week.
The SaneBox cancellation itself is worth mentioning: accounts can be cancelled from the account dashboard at sanebox.com without contacting support. There is no annual contract on month-to-month billing. Filters trained by SaneBox remain as IMAP folders on your email server even after you cancel — you will need to manually clean them up or leave them in place (they become inactive without the service).
One practical note: SaneBox's SaneReminders and SaneNoReplies features have no direct equivalent in Agentys. If you rely heavily on the reminder functionality — especially SaneNoReplies for outbound follow-up — factor that into your timing. Agentys's follow-up detection operates differently: it flags unanswered threads for you automatically rather than letting you set manual reminder timestamps. Whether that approach fits your workflow depends on whether you prefer proactive surfacing or explicit control.
Who This Switch Makes Sense For
The decision to switch from SaneBox to Agentys comes down to three variables: your email volume, your platform, and whether your remaining time cost after filtering is still significant.
The switch makes clear sense if you receive 40 or more emails per day that require a reply, you are on Gmail or Outlook, and you have already noticed that a cleaner inbox has not meaningfully reduced the time you spend writing responses. SaneBox solved the noise problem; the composing time is what remains. At $16.99/month versus SaneBox's Dinner plan at $36/month, Agentys costs less while adding the drafting layer that SaneBox does not provide.
The switch also makes sense if you are currently running SaneBox alongside a separate AI writing tool or a follow-up tracker. Consolidating to a single tool that handles filtering, drafting, and follow-up detection reduces your monthly tool spend and the mental overhead of managing multiple subscriptions.
If you need IMAP-universal support across many providers, SaneBox is still the filtering option there for one plain reason — Agentys connects only to Gmail and Outlook, so it does not reach those inboxes at all. For most Gmail and Outlook users past 40 replies a day, though, the composing time is exactly what Agentys removes, and that is the cost filtering alone never touches.
The Radicati Group estimates that 361 billion emails were sent daily in 2024, a figure projected to grow through 2028 (Radicati Group, *Email Statistics Report 2024-2028*, 2024). The per-user volume problem is not getting smaller. Tools that only filter are solving a necessary but insufficient piece of the problem. The question every SaneBox user eventually reaches is not whether filtering was worth it — it usually was — but whether filtering is enough.
SaneBox is not a product you outgrow because it got worse. You outgrow it because the problem it solves is upstream of the problem you are now trying to fix. If you are on Gmail or Outlook, your inbox is already clean thanks to SaneBox, and you are still spending two hours a day on email — the bottleneck is not filtering, it is drafting. Agentys at $16.99/month addresses that next layer: automatic draft generation, style-matched to your voice, with priority sorting built in. The one honest caveat is platform: if you are not on Gmail or Outlook, Agentys cannot reach your inbox, so SaneBox stays the filtering option there. On Gmail or Outlook, the switch is worth considering the moment a cleaner inbox and a full reply queue start to look the same.