Alternatives
SaneBox,
beside Brood.
If you use SaneBox, or are choosing between it and Brood, this page sets out what SaneBox reads, from its own pages, beside what Brood reads. Each line about SaneBox links to the page it comes from, with the day we read it.
What each reads.
How it reaches your Gmail
SaneBox
Your password or an OAuth token; its security page names no Google scopes. From SaneBox, Security, read 9 October 2026.
Brood
- Email metadata: sender, recipients, date, existing labels
- Permission to create and modify labels in your Gmail
- Permission to create and modify Gmail filters
What it reads
SaneBox
Headers, without saying which, to decide what is important; the body for optional features, which it says it never stores. From SaneBox, Security, read 9 October 2026.
Brood
It never reads:
- The subject line of any message
- The body of any message
- Attachments of any kind
- Anything you've drafted but not sent
- Anything in Drive, Calendar, Meet, or Contacts
- Anything we'd use to train a model
Whether your mail goes to a model
SaneBox
AI summaries and drafted replies, with no provider named. From SaneBox Help, SaneBox AI features, read 9 October 2026.
Brood
Brood decides what to propose by rules and counts you can read, and never sends your data to a model, its own or anyone else's. If you point an assistant of your own at what Brood has learned, that is your assistant, reading your record, because you asked.
The permission that lets Brood file your mail also lets it read your mail. Google does not offer a narrower one that can label a message you have already received. Brood never uses it to read. Every request it makes asks for metadata only, through one module, and the subject line is not among the headers it asks for, so it never arrives at all. So the promise is that Brood never reads what your mail says, not that it can't.
Moving over to Brood.
SaneBox files mail by moving it into folders of its own: @SaneLater, @SaneNews, @SaneCC, snooze folders such as @SaneTomorrow, folders you train by moving examples in, and @SaneBlackHole, which takes a sender's mail out of the inbox and can later send it to the Trash on its own. From SaneBox Help, What is a feature?, read 12 October 2026.
SaneBox sorts after your own Gmail filters, and leaves alone the mail they move out of the inbox. From SaneBox Help, What happens to the filters and rules that I used prior to enabling SaneBox?, read 12 October 2026.
On the Classifications page, Show my own filters names any of the folders above that it finds in your Gmail as left by the product that made them. Brood does not file into them or change them, so what becomes of the mail in them is yours to decide.
Brood's rules are Gmail filters: when you confirm a home, Brood writes a filter in Gmail for what comes next.