OtherInbox: Organize Your Non-Critical Email For Free
Joshua Baer (@joshuabaer), founder of OtherInbox, was nice enough to sit down with us this weekend at SXSW Interactive and go over what's new with his company's product. OtherInbox was developed out of a need to intelligently manage the rest of your mail. That is to say, the mail that you might get from mailing lists, shopping sites, and other services but may not actually be from another human. We all get this mail, and to a greater or lesser extent have developed strategies to manage it, but OtherInbox provides a comprehensive and stylish solution. The big news is that the core service is now free of cost.
The basic premise of OtherInbox (or OIB) is that it will identify and organize all the mail that you wouldn't categorize as critical to read right away, such as receipts, subscription updates, mailing list emails, and so on. For those people who have a single Gmail account (currently OtherInbox only works with Gmail or IMAP accounts) this would represent a drop-in solution to moving all the clutter mail out of the immediate inbox, but keeping it available in case you want to peruse any of it later.
OtherInbox attempts to have as light a touch as possible when it comes to your Gmail account. Mainly, all you will see after it has done its initial pass through your mail is a new otherinbox label that you can use to archive or delete that mail. If you happen to have more than one incoming email address pointing to Gmail, OtherInbox will also automatically create labels for them as well.
Once in your OIB mailbox, the story is different. Here, all the mail that you agreed that OIB could import is listed by category (or what OIB calls mailboxes), which you can quickly step through and perform mass actions on, such as marking as read or deleting. The mailboxes can be created manually (there is a new mailbox button at the bottom of the page) or automatically, simply by sending email directly to your custom OtherInbox email domain directly. For example, if your OIB account name was johndoe, you could fill out an online form for some free stuff with the email address freestuff@johndoe.otherinbox.com. This would create the new mailbox freestuff in your OIB inbox containing any mail that is sent to you from that site. If a spammer gets ahold of that address, simply click on the block mailbox button and you will never see any email in that mailbox again.
We have been using OIB for a few days now, just trying to get a feel for the product as a whole. Some folks may only be interested in using the service primarily for its disposable email address ability, but we think that OIB is looking further and is trying to become the primary repository for all your other mail. You know -- the stuff you don't want but can't quite get rid of. To that end, OIB is also planning to support other online mail services such as Yahoo! Mail.
Finally we should mention that the free service, while offering everything that OtherInbox features without limitation, is restricted to only showing the last 30 days of email that has been introduced into your OIB account. If you stay on top of your OtherInbox mail, this should be no problem. However, if you do want to see everything, you can sign up for the premium service for $19.99 a year.
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I can see the practicality of this for uses of systems OTHER than Gmail.
But with Gmail's filters, searches and now alternative inboxes I fail to see any real value here
I would rather control it all myself as many Gmail aficionados would too.
So Fairly good idea without a killer 'Hook' :)
Cheers
@Noblejoker
I agree with Noblejoker. I've set up gmail filters so they automatically label and archive all newsletters I subscribe to. I don't see any added value here.
The best part of using OIB for me is that my work blocks access to all web based e-mail providers. With the RSS feature of OIB I can check all my e-mail via GReader and not have to worry about it.
That and given the fact that I can create accounts on the fly so that I don't get SPAM or any such mess to my gmail accounts is awesome as well.
I've been using OIB for months now. I don't use Gmail integration. That's useful for people whose inboxes are out of control and don't know how to use filters. Most readers of this blog won't fit in that category and I don't either. However, if RWW readers are like me (and I think you are) you are constantly signing up for the latest Web 2.0 betas - each of which wants your e-mail address and wants to send you updates about your social network. This is annoying as hell, and its even more annoying to have to constantly create new filters for each of these services. This is where OIB comes in handy: Simply give a new address at websitename@username.otherinbox.com (i.e. readwriteweb@myaccount.otherinbox.com) when you sign up and you are done! The best thing, and the thing I think OIB could do more with, is that you never even need to go to the OIB site to check these updates. Everything can be pulled in via a RSS feed - which is the primary way I use OIB. It is basically a single RSS feed of all my various social web accounts. All those twitter, facebook, friendfeed, etc. mail updates now go to a single RSS feed, and are out of my Gmail account altogether. Gmail is now only for actual e-mail, not for status updates.
That's a good point, and one I forgot to mention in my post, Snay. OIB has full RSS feed support for any of the mail that comes in to your account, which is a pretty unique and potentially useful feature!
@Noblejoker NS @jaja
At first I took the approach your talking about. I have my own domain and I would setup an e-mail alias for each service I signed up with. Then, I would setup a forwarder and respective label in gmail. After a while, I got tired of doing this and just went back to using my normal e-mail address. This didn't help me to stay organized nor help me sort through many of the valid e-mails I receive daily.
Then, a friend suggested I try out otherinbox.com. What a time saver! I've connected it to a subdomain and now I just make up an address on the fly (e.g. readwriteweb@subdomain.mydomain.com) and all e-mail is sorted and filtered now and in the future. I don't have to do anything else and can get on with the more important things.
Additionally, when I log in to check my gmail, I can be assured that I am shown only what needs my immediate attention and I am not distracted by less important e-mail. At my leisure I can check my OIB account.
I suggested you both give OIB a try, you have nothing to lose.
-Josh
I have been using otherinbox since early beta and have had a very similar experience with it as I had with twitter. I didn't get it right away, but the more I use it, them more I can't live without it.
I barely even use the automatic Gmail filters. The infinite reusable email addresses and the automatic calendaring are what keep me using it.
I'm a Gmail user, and I've tried the rules and folders route and I've also tried registering a mail domain and setting up forwarders.
Unfortunately the rules and folders approach doesn't help you track who is sharing your email details which is what I like about OIB. Also it is much harder to 'switch' off a particular spammer - with OIB if Company X has shared your email and you're now being spammed by Company Y etc., etc., then you simple switch off your Company X address and all the spam from them and everyone they shared your details with is history.
As for mail forwarding domains, it was fun initially, but having to set up individual addresses before using them plus having to manage the ever increasing number of them soon became tedious :-(
I don't necessarily think Otherinbox will replace Gmail as I'll still use that for friends and family and one or two trusted companies, but Otherinbox will be my first line of defence for the million and one other people out there who want your details.
I've been using OI since September/October of last year when I first read about it on RWW. I have 3 GMail accts that I still actively use. I can tell you first hand that OI has saved me hundreds of hours I used to spend "managing" email in my GMail accounts.
GMails filters are great and I still use them for routing email from real people, but they do not compare with the simplicity of OI. OI doesn't require me to create new filters, it handles that for me.
My philosophy is that my GMail accts are for real people requiring a real response or sending me information I requested. I used to live in my email - tethered to it. Now, I check email roughly once per day and usually spend only about 30-60 minutes on it. I've also found AwayFind to be another great tool for breaking the shackles of email.
I log into OI only when I need information (such as coupon for GoDaddy or something similar). Other than that, I don't think about it. Plus, by centralizing ALL of my non-human emails into a single account (as opposed to having them spread across 3 GMail accts), I don't have to wonder which account holds the data I'm looking for.
$20/year is well worth it to me and I will gladly upgrade my plan.
Cheers!
Travis
@TRONash
@rdsh And OIB shouldn't replace gmail. They're not even trying to. The big win, for me, was realizing that you aren't supposed to ditch your "real" email address... this is your OTHER inbox. Your OIB is for email you get from computers.
It means you can sign up to get stuff from Best Buy or Marie Callendar's or whatever. It won't clutter up your gmail in box, you don't have to set up filters and you can ignore it until you're thinking of going there when you can check to see if they happen to have sent you any coupons or whatever.
Also, as noted by rdsh, since you've given a unique email address to each site, if one of them sells your address you not know know who did it, but you can kill the address and never hear from them or anyone they dealt with ever again. The best gmail could do it set your filter to auto-delete, but that would (generally) only capture the original site, not the sites they sold to.
Most of the comments on this page seem to be authored by OIB folks themselves.
Hardly see a comment that talks about why OIB may not be useful - hard to believe EVERYONE found it to be useful?