Paul Chambers

This has replaced a large number of mail rules I used to have - and more importantly, the time I spent maintaining them. Also adds a bunch of functionality over and above what mail rules can do (even using imapfilter). However, there is a fly in the ointment. With push notifications, I frequently get notified of an email arriving before Sanebox has a chance to 'see' it and files it away for later. So I get a lot more 'nuisance' notifications for emails that Sanebox decides isn't important a few moments later. In other words, there's a race condition between email client notifications and Sanebox processing. Their support folk are aware of this, and their workaround is to turn off push notifications. I wasn't impressed. I've suggested that they add the ability to configure which folder they consider is the 'Inbox', so I can write a single mail rule to put incoming mail there. Then Sanebox would see the email before any email clients, who would continue to monitor the actual Inbox. That way I'd only get notified for emails that Sanebox determined should be moved to the actual Inbox from the secondary one. However, I don't know if this is something Sanebox are considering - the support person said they'd pass the suggestion along, but given how long sanebox has been available, I can't believe this is a new idea to them. So I'm not holding my breath, and I'm still looking for either a way to work around this, or an alternative that doesn't have this flaw.

Recently switched over from calendly.com, and so far, I like it better. Mostly for subtle touches in the user experience.

Overall, an excellent experience. I would describe it as catering to the more sophisticated user of DNS services, but that's fine, average users are more than adequately served by services already available (and it's hard to compete with free). It's not the only service to offer privacy for your DNS lookups, but I prefer it over the others I've tried. I don't personally use the block lists much, but it's a feature that's offered. The initial design concepts seem more focused on a model where devices on the network are configured individually to use ControlD; I use it on the router to handle all the DNS traffic from my home network through one central point. Recently, features have been added to make this 'centralized on the router' model work more effectively. These features aren't (yet?) exposed through the (nice) web interface on the service side, so to take advantage of them, you'll be manually editing the configuration files on the router. A web UI may be coming, I don't know. It may be difficult to expose both conceptual models in one user experience without it becoming confusing. One of the powerful features is the ability configure it to redirect traffic to a country-specific proxy when a host resolves to an IP address located in a country you configure. In practice, this is closer to the 'Smart DNS' feature offered by some VPN providers, and isn't a substitute for a VPN connection to a server in the destination country. Still, it's a useful feature to have in some circumstances. Just don't expect it to fool Netflix or BBC iPlayer's geo-locked content protection :)

I've been using the beta version, and subscribed early. It's a shame I can't take advantage of the discount, I signed up for the annual plan :) This has got to be one of the stickiest services I've come across. And is likely to become even stickier over time. I'm still using 1Password, as there isn't feature parity yet (e.g. we're on a family plan, with shared vaults). Looking forward to Cloaked Pay, as I'm a heavy user of Privacy.com already. Any plans to add an OpenID/'Facebook Connect'/'Google Login' type service? That would be excellent for your users, though I could see services being reluctant to support it. Off to a great start, and lots of potential for adding value.