Someone has to be accountable for your inbox.
Before you trust Siftbox with something this personal, you should know who’s running the team behind it.
Dr. Andrew Ko
I’m a professor and strategist, and I’ve spent about a decade on one question: how people behave, how data listens, and why personalization so often gets it wrong. I write about it at The Data Human, where the Index scores companies on transparency, consent, clarity, control, and empathy. Before that I co-founded Personalyze, a behavioural intelligence company that helped global brands understand audiences through public social data.
The book I’m writing is called The Consumer Hypocrisy, after the paradox at the centre of all this: we want brands to know everything about us, without telling them anything. Consumers expect relevance, brands need data, and trust sits uncomfortably in the middle.
Siftbox is what happens when you stop writing about that tension and build the way out of it. You get every sale and every newsletter you actually care about. The brand gets a working address and a real reader. Nobody has to hand over their inbox for it.
The rule we won’t break
We publish what brands do. We never publish what you do.
- Your real inbox is never read. Siftbox only ever sees mail sent to your Siftbox address. It has no access to your actual mailbox, and never asks for any.
- The Brand Observatory is about brands, not people. Every figure there describes a retailer’s own behaviour, measured from inboxes we run ourselves. Nothing on those pages comes from a user’s mail.
- We won’t extract. The inbox tools that quietly sold their users’ data never earned that trust back. That’s extraction, value taken from you, for someone else, that you never understood or agreed to or gained from. Nothing about you leaves without you knowing, nothing that identifies you as a person is ever sold, and anything we ever build from what we learn has to be something that brings value. Trust, not extraction, is the whole point.
Where things actually stand
Siftbox is early. It’s free, it works, and it’s built by a small independent team in Toronto, not a faceless company. If something breaks, an actual human reads the complaint, and more often than not, that’s me.