Home OtherInbox: Organize Your Non-Critical Email For Free

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 [email protected]. 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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