I’d like to thank SaneBox for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. SaneBox is a kick in the pants for your email. It adds a host of additional features to any email account and works with exchange, Google mail, or IMAP accounts.

There is a lot you can do with SaneBox to tame your email. One feature that a lot of users aren’t aware of is SaneReminders. Often you will send an email to someone and have some sort of expectation about a reply. That creates a pesky problem for you. Do you try and just remember to follow up on it in a week or two? Do you tie a string around your finger? Do you create a task in your task list application to remind you to check on whether or not there’s a reply? There really isn’t a simple, efficient way to handle that problem.

With SaneReminders, when you send an email to someone, you can blind copy it to SaneBox with some designated amount of time like, “1week@sanebox.com”. SaneBox then quietly watches out for a reply to that email. If you don’t get a reply within one week, you get a note from SaneBox reminding you. If you deal with a lot of people, this is a completely friction-free way to track email replies. I use this feature every day.

Learn more about all of the features of SaneBox over at SaneBox.com. If you sign up using the links in this post, you even get a nice discount. Who doesn’t want a nice discount? Thank you SaneBox for supporting MacSparky.com.

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Interact, an app for your iPad and iPhone to manage your contacts like no other. I am doing a lot of work on the iPad these days and one of my surprises as I dive deep is that some apps on iOS are better than those on the Mac. That is the case for this week’s sponsor, Interact. Interact helps you create, organize, and communicate with your contacts in ways that just haven’t been possible before. It’s so good that I actually prefer managing contacts on my iPad now over the Mac.

Interact empowers you and your contacts to get more done in less time, with features like group management, one-tap contact creation, and easy communication.

Interact works directly with your iOS Contacts accounts, adding features not available in the built-in iPhone and iPad Contacts app, like:

• Group management. Create and manage membership in groups.
• Capture contact information from plain text anywhere with the system with the Contact Scratchpad. The Scratchpad automatically recognizes phone numbers, emails, addresses and much more to easily turn an email signature or other block of text into a complete contact record. This feature is spooky and awesome all at once.
• Send group emails and messages with attachments from photos or files from Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive or any other iOS document provider.

And best of all, since Interact works directly with iOS Contacts, any work done in Interact is immediately reflected throughout iOS whereever contacts are used.

Get Interact on the App Store today!

This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by SaneBox. I’ve been using SaneBox for years and at this point I can’t imagine email without it. There are so many great benefits to Sanebox. It filters my mail so I don’t wake up to an inbox bursting with irrelevant email. It allows me to defer email messages so they get out of the way while I am doing other things. It also lets me set reminders for outgoing emails.

One thing I’ve never covered, however, is SaneBox’s advanced filtering features. Once you set up your SaneBox email filtering, there are some great options. 

With SaneVIP, you can give your friends and co-workers a word or phrase to add to the subject line of their email messages to push their email to the top of your list.

You can also set the SaneBox intelligence setting between Smart, Moderate, and Manual to change how aggressively SaneBox sorts your mail for you.

SaneSubjects lets you teach SaneBox about subjects that are or are not important to you and lets SaneBox do an even better job of appropriately filing related messages.

There’s also Manual Domain Filtering. Usually SaneBlackHole takes care of any Spam that gets through your net but if you are still having an issue, you can send all messages from a certain domain to the black hole. This is not just a feature for dealing with spam. You could also, for instance, sort all email from a certain domain in your “Later” box or your inbox or any other folder you create through SaneBox.

Somewhat related, you can also specifically identify certain domains that are important to you. Once you do that, SaneBox keeps an eye out for an email from that domain and treats it appropriately.

Because all of this work is done through the SaneBox service, you can use it with any email application you want and this frees you to try and switch mail apps at will.

I love using SaneBox. I’ve talked to the team at SaneBox and they are getting ridiculously high conversion rates from MacSparky readers and Mac Power Users listeners. Because of this, they are offering the highest discount they’ve ever offered just for you. If you sign up now, you get a $25 discount. That’s only good for a few more weeks so make sure to take advantage of it. To do so, go to SaneBox.com/MPU and cash in.

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Marketcircle, the makers of Billings Pro – a time-tracking & invoicing app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone & Apple Watch. It’s great for freelancers and small businesses such as consultants, lawyers, designers, photographers, that need an easy way to keep track of time spent on client work and a fast way to produce professional looking invoices.

Billings Pro syncs all your devices across all your team members, so you can track time for a project while out on your iPhone while a team member tracks time on their Mac at the office. It supports 3D touch, making it quick and easy for you to start a new timer or jump to a recent one, and includes a handy widget that lets you manage your Billings Pro timers within the Notification Centre. Easily add comments to your slips so you remember all the details of the work you did during that time. 

After the work is done, Billings Pro makes it really quick and simple to invoice–whether you’re creating the invoice from your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. You just select the time slips, pick an invoice template, and send. You can also add expenses or bill by flat rate. Comments jotted down on your time slips can be added to the invoice so your client has a clear understanding of the work you did – which means you get paid faster, with fewer questions. Billings Pro customers really like the invoice templates because they are clear and professional looking – and you can further customize invoices to fit your own brand. Marketcircle is full of smart developers and designers that love the Mac an iOS and if you try this app, you’ll see their attention to detail everywhere.

Read about other Mac users using Billings Pro here or experience Billings Pro for yourself with a free 30 day trial.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox. SaneBox is the answer to your email problems. It filters your email for you, only showing you the most important in setting the less important aside for later. SaneBox also gives you the ability to defer your email, no matter which email client you use. There are many additional features like the ability to remind you when someone doesn’t reply to an email you sent.

The point is they are always making it better. The latest example of that is the SaneConnect service. It’s currently in beta but it’s pretty impressive. SaneConnect shows you the history of your relationship with different companies. Just type in the name of their domain and you see who you’ve been emailing and how often. It even rates the strength of the relationship. It gets even more powerful with team accounts where you can search for a Company and see which of your teammates have relationships there. It’s like asking for introductions on LinkedIn based on email history. It’s a great idea and it’s available to SaneBox subscribers.

Learn more at SaneBox.com.

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Marketcircle helps individuals, teams, and small businesses on the Mac, iPhone and iPad be more productive with their two apps, Daylite and Billings Pro.

For those of you who don’t know about Daylite, it has been around for almost 15 years. Daylite helps you manage clients, schedules, tasks, projects, emails and new business opportunities, all in one app where they’re interconnected. From a single client you can see emails to and from, who referred them, pending business deals, booked or upcoming appointments, and even future followups. Or from a single Project you can see each person and their role, the tasks and who’s responsible, meetings about the project, and notes, all in chronological order. Daylite helps you remember the little details so you don’t have to worry about anything falling through the cracks. And when you invite team members, you can share this information, assign tasks or check each others calendars before scheduling meetings.

With the release of Daylite 6, Marketcircle has made it even easier to get started. Create an account and login from your Mac, iPhone or iPad. Once logged in, you can even work with or without an Internet connection. Daylite will sync changes between devices and teammates when a connection is available so you always have access to your information. Marketcircle includes a 30 day trial for Daylite, with monthly and yearly plans. Daylite is made by awesome, smart people that love the Mac and iOS.

You can even read about other companies using Daylite here.

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The holidays are over and you may know of some little ones with shiny new iOS and Android devices. That’s great. Kids should be using technology. However, they should also be subject to rational limitations. That, however, is easier said than done. Enter curbi. 

Curbi lets kids enjoy the Internet while at the same time protecting them from the nefarious parts. One of the great things about Curbi is that it protects kids not only your local WiFi network, but also through a cellular connection or at a friend’s house. curbi solves this problem, giving you amazing parental controls for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. You can easily block specific types of content or add a specific site list. curbi tracks (and can block) websites through Safari or any other iOS app that has a web browser. Perhaps even more importantly, the curbi blocks will work no matter how they access the Internet, even using their pal’s home WiFi on the other side of town.

curbi also lets you set boundaries. For example, you could block social networks from 3pm to 6pm and the entire Internet from 9pm to 8am. For just $6.99 a month, you can protect all of the iOS devices in your home. curbi is the only service I’ve ever seen that can protect your kids, no matter where they are. Learn more here.

I’m pleased to welcome back Tinderbox as this week’s sponsor. While software to calculate numbers or layout a page of text have been around a long time, we are in the early days of applications that help you think. I’m fascinated by applications that can help you unravel your thoughts and put them back together in new and interesting ways.

One of the finest in this category is Tinderbox. I’ve never really used anything like Tinderbox before. It starts out as a place to collect and organize your notes. While there are plenty of apps that let you write stuff down, Tinderbox stands out in the ways it shows you your data. You can link different notes together and display them back in different formats. There are outline, map, and chart views that you can easily jump between, letting both the right and left sides of your brain have a look. There is also a built in timeline tool that can create an interactive timeline among dated notes. Tinderbox can even collect and report on data it accumulates from its own file.

Version 6.4 is now out and it ads footnotes, word clouds, gorgeous outline export, and all sorts of fresh support for DEVONthink Office Pro, Delicious Library, and your calendar.

I’ve been using Tinderbox in the legal practice to track facts and issues arising out of litigation matters. I’ve also used it to plan and negotiate complex contracts. Tinderbox is flexible and you can sculpt it to your own needs. 

Tinderbox can make a difference for you too. Head over to the Tinderbox website to check out further details and screenshots.

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I’m pleased to welcome PopClip as this week’s MacSparky.com sponsor. PopClip is a Mac utility that gives you the ability to perform acts upon your text just by selecting it. Select some text and you are just one tap away from doing something clever, like changing text formatting or dialing a selected phone number. This works just like the popup tools you get on the iPhone and iPad. One of my favorite PopClip actions is putting quotes around selected text when I’m writing legal briefs.

There are now 143 downloadable PopClip extensions that range from something as simple as converting the selected text to uppercase to something more exotic, like looking up the selected word in the urban dictionary or sort the selected text alphabetically.

For just $6.99 you can dramatically shorten the amount of time you spend formatting and otherwise working with text on your Mac. This one’s a no-brainer. Learn more at the developer’s website.