The Sally module of an ideal is an important tool to interplay between Hilbert coefficients and the properties of the associated graded ring. In this paper we give new insights on the structure of the Sally module. We apply these results characterizing the almost minimal value of the first Hilbert coefficient in the case of the normal filtration in an analytically unramified Cohen-Macaulay local ring. 1 2 MASUTI, OZEKI, AND ROSSI e i (I), called the normal Hilbert coefficients of I, such that for n ≫ 0Here ℓ R (N) denotes, for an R-module N, the length of N. Since R/m is infinite there exists a minimal reduction J = (a 1 , . . . , a d ) of I and, under our assumptions, there exists a positive integer r such that I n+1 = JI n for n ≥ r. We set r J (I) := min{r ≥ 0 | I n+1 = JI n for all n ≥ r} the reduction number of I.We recall that e 1 (I) ≥ 0, but the bound can be more precise. It is well known thatMoreover, the equality holds true if and only if I n+1 = J n I for every n ≥ 0 and for every minimal reduction J of I (that is r J (I) ≤ 1) ([Nor60,Hun87,Ito92,Ooi87]). In this case the normal associated graded ring G(I) := ⊕ n≥0 I n /I n+1 of I is Cohen-Macaulay. Recently [CPR16] showed that if the equality e 1 (I) = e 0 (I) − ℓ R (R/I) + 1 holds true, then depth G(I) ≥ d −1 (see also Corollary 4.3). This equality was explored by Phuong [Phu15] in the case R is generalized Cohen-Macaulay. By [EV91, GR98, Ito92, HM97] it is known thatand the equality holds true if and only if I n+1 = J n−1 I 2 for every n ≥ 1 (that is r J (I) ≤ 2). In this case the normal associated graded ring G(I) of I is Cohen-Macaulay (see also Corollary 2.9). We notice that ℓ R (I 2 /JI) does not depend on a minimal reduction J of I (see for instance [RV10]). Thus the ideals I with e 1 (I) = e 0 (I) − ℓ R (R/I) + ℓ R (I 2 /JI) enjoy nice properties and it seems natural to ask when the equality e 1 (I) = e 0 (I) − ℓ R (R/I) + ℓ R (I 2 /JI) + 1 holds. The main purpose of this paper is to explore this equality which is the content of Section 3. We present in this case the structure of the Sally module and, in particular, we prove that depth G(I) ≥ d − 1 (Theorem 3.1). We remark that if I is integrally closed, the corresponding equality was studied in [OR16]. In [OR16] the authors proved that if the equality e 1 (I) = e 0 (I) − ℓ R (R/I) + ℓ R (I 2 /JI) + 1 holds true, then the depth of the associated graded ring G(I) := n≥0 I n /I n+1 can be any integer between 0 and d − 1 (see [OR16, Theorem 5.1]). This "bad" behavior motives our study in the case of the normal filtration proving that it enjoys nice properties as compared to the I-adic filtration.As the title outlines, an important tool in this paper is the Sally module introduced by W. V. Vasconcelos [Vas94]. The aim of the author was to define a module in between the associated graded ring and the Rees algebra taking care of important information coming from a minimal reduction. Actually, a more detailed information comes from the graded parts of a suitable filtration {C (i) } of the Sally modul...