As Joshua Baer put in OtherInbox’s Techcrunch50 presentation, we all have that other inbox that we send certain things to so it doesn’t show up in our work email account. One of the most annoying things is to have a list of emails that you just don’t want. OtherInbox is a great way to control these emails. After using OtherInbox for a few months, I’ve decided its become such an important part of the way I work, that I want to do a complete review of it.
OtherInbox was a company founded in January 2008, and came out into private beta at TechCrunch50 in September 2008. The Big focus of OtherInbox is to be able to easily organize the automated messages that get sent in large amounts to your email, and also easily block a email address that has started to get spam. Lets get started.
One of the best parts about OtherInbox is that it automatically creates mailboxes for you as they come in. When you sign up, you are given a subdomain, in my case chacha102.otherinbox.com (Note: They will be shortening the url to username.oib.com soon). When you want to send an email, you can basically put anything in the mailbox portion of the email to create a new ‘Group’ in your OtherInbox. All emails going to test@chacha102.otherinbox.com will be grouped together.
Going off of this idea, if you assign each new site a different mailbox, you then are able to later find out who is sending you spam. There is also a ‘Block’ button so you can in essence, shutdown that mailbox.
Now for the graphical part. When you first enter OtherInbox you are greeted with a 2 column sidebar. The first column provides you with things like: Inbox, Saved, Send, Deleted, and Blocked Messages. The second column filters even more by what mailbox you are looking at. Then you get the Outlook style message pane with a list of messages on top, and a nice big viewing area below. (Evernote it awesome for taking screenshots).
At the top you have the big OtherInbox Logo which doubles as a refresh buttons, but the service automatically refreshes every time you change mailboxes, and additionally refreshes every 60 seconds. As of right now (12/08) the receipts, coupons, and calendar button isn’t working. Hopefully those buttons will give way to really cool ways to sort through your emails to give the relevant information.
On the bottom, you have a simple way to compose a new message, and while composing it will give you a list of emails you can send from. Sadly, you can only send from mailboxes that have already been created, but that’s what the next button is for.
To create a new mailbox, simply hit the button and you will be forwarded to a page asking for a name. Under it you can write down notes about a specific mailbox. You can later access those notes by hovering over the mailbox in the main window. Although, you don’t have to create mailboxes beforehand. If you send an email to anything@chacha102.otherinbox.com, it will create the mailbox on the fly, making it easier to use.
OtherInbox allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds, and those feeds will show up in the mailbox. If you wanted to subscribe to a RSS feed about coupons, you simply could edit the mailbox and add that RSS feed. This also makes OtherInbox a RSS reader if you want to consolidate all of it into a single application.
Now that I’ve probably bored you with too much information about OtherInbox, lets just wrap the last features up quickly:
- You can have OtherInbox use your own domain instead of the long and annoying username.otherinbox.com
- OtherInbox sends you a summary of unread emails to your normal email once a day(You can configure this)
- You can have OtherInbox send the first email a new mailbox gets straight to your email, really good for confirmation stuff.
- OtherInbox has Mailing List and CraigList Sorting support
- All Emails can be exported into a nice text format
Hope you found this stuff interesting, and I hope to be posting more about it in the future.