Thursday, September 25, 2008
OtherInbox: The Answer to Email Overload?
byIf you are like many Web users who have signed up for numerous online newsletters, subscriptions and social networking sites throughout the last few years, you may experience email overload in the form of seemingly unmanageable messages within your work or personal email inbox.
Released earlier this month, OtherInbox beta, currently an invite-only Web application, offers free automated email management for Web users to fight spam and organize email messages such as notifications and solicited email marketing.
The OtherInbox blog answer's the question "What is OtherInbox?" this way:
OtherInbox is the email address I use for all the stuff I don't want coming to my main email address — mostly shopping, news and social networking. Pretty much any time I'm not giving my email address to a real person I use my OtherInbox.
OtherInbox assigns a domain to a user allowing them to create email addresses on the fly when signing up for online communications. For example, let's say an OtherInbox user "someuser" would like to subscribe to Barnes & Noble email offers. The email address entered when subscribing on the retailer's site could be: "bn@someuser.otherinbox.com". The first part of the address "bn" can be anything and is used to automatically create a folder within your OtherInbox Web interface to keep messages organized and available for you whenever you are ready to view.
It is possible to manage these types of messages by using email service providers like Gmail to configure similar functionality with filters and rules. However, I do see some advantages of using an automated service such as OtherInbox as a place to organize and browse promotional offers and newsletters in the form of HTML email during a time of leisure. These periodic messages are usually welcome but sometimes tend to get overwhelming and in the way when person to person communications need to be quickly acted on.
The beta program signup form can be found on the OtherInbox blog. I hope this review has provided some helpful information on your path to a more manageable email inbox. For more time-saving productivity information, Zero Inbox: Action-based email is a good read.
