SaneBox Now Has A Solution For The Enterprise Email Overload Crisis

Enterprise users get more than their fair share of unimportant email. To help this problem, SaneBox, a time-saving email product, is now targeting in the enterprise space. Two months ago, TechCrunch wrote how SaneBox was taming email overload with its smart email filtering service. Today, the Boston-based startup is launching SaneBox for Business. Enterprise customers will be able to setup SaneBox on existing systems such as Google Apps, Exchange, Outlook and Lotus Notes.

SaneBox filters non-important emails out of your main inbox. It’s easily customizable and learns from your actions. It also lets you zap emails to the Black Hole, so you never see email from that sender again. Some of these features could be set up using mail rules and filters, but its much quicker with SaneBox. Other SaneBox features include smart reminders, snoozing email, and calendar syncing. For a more in-depth review, see the earlier post.

Corporate email clutter is a big problem. A study by the research firm Radicati estimates corporate users are now dealing with 200 emails per day. Middle managers spend 100 hours a year on irrelevant email, according to another study by The Grossman Group. That study also says companies experimenting with email black-outs or time-outs are taking the wrong approach. It agrues email misbehaviors the need to be addressed, not bans.

SaneBox VP of Growth Dmitri Leonov, tells TechCrunch the reason email overload affects corporate employees more “is largely due to lots of internal emails that aren’t really important to each individual’s job. We see an opportunity to alleviate this problem for corporate users.”

Leonov says another reason for the new product is the “vast majority of enterprises use Exchange/Outlook, which haven’t been spoiled with add-ons, unlike Gmail users. With this release, we’re allowing IT managers to enable SaneBox for all of their Exchange users easily and securely.” Sanebox is a cloud service, so there is no download or application for corporate IT to maintain.

The company has also launched an integration with Salesforce.com, that treat emails from top CRM leads as a high priority.

SaneBox for Business gives a 15% discount to qualified enterprises off the regular $5 per month user account. The company already claims a very high conversion rate, saying lately half the users who sign up for a free trial become paying customers. Still, each corporate user would be able to make their own decision whether use it or not.

In the first post about SaneBox, Leonov talked about how solving the email overload problem with filtering was a “very difficult and expensive problem to solve – one giant edge case,” requiring a lot of infrastructure per-user. With 12 million employees in just the top 50 for the Fortune 500 companies, SaneBox better be ready with a lot of that infrastructure. While SaneBox says the personal business is a huge opportunity for them, the enterprise approach is more scalable.

I’ve been using SaneBox for more than two months now and its really made a difference for me. I can’t imagine going without it.

The B2B business is a whole different ball game from the B2C business. But SaneBox will be trying to win over some new corporate customers as they launch and demo their product at today’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.