Special delivery: OtherInbox diverts automated messages and places them in different folders, depending on the sender. A user can choose to block all messages from a particular source with a single click.
OtherInbox
OtherInbox manages a user's automated e-mails.
Despite all our best efforts, most of us are still drowning in e-mail, and much of it is sent by machines rather than real people. OtherInbox, a Web service launched this weekend at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) conference, in Austin, TX, promises to rescue e-mail-swamped users from this problem.
The messages that the new service handles usually aren't spam. Instead, they're legitimate communications from trusted companies that sometimes contain useful information: alerts, special offers, and service updates. But the steady influx of these automated messages is a familiar problem for most users.
The basic idea, explains OtherInbox CEO Josh Baer, is to categorize e-mails based on their source. For example, all e-mails from Amazon are automatically placed in one folder, and all e-mails from Facebook go into another. Baer says that he built the service after realizing that automated e-mails make up a huge percentage of all the messages that many users have to deal with--often as much as 50 percent.
Users can get an e-mail address through the service itself or can connect OtherInbox to an existing Gmail account. When a user gives the service his login credentials for Gmail, it sorts through his inbox, analyzing its contents. The service then removes automated messages, leaving a cleaner inbox containing messages from real contacts only. Before diverting these messages, however, the service shows the user its planned reorganization, giving him the opportunity to accept or override any changes. It also shows him what percentage of his e-mail, on average, is automated, and estimates how much e-mail he could get rid of using the service.
Automated e-mails are then archived in Gmail and copied to OtherInbox, where they're organized in folders. The user also receives one daily e-mail summarizing all the automated messages that have come in and what OtherInbox has done with them. OtherInbox also lets users deal with automated e-mails in batches--for example, allowing them to block one type of e-mail with a click if it turns out that it simply isn't useful.
Baer explains that the concept stemmed from his personal e-mail habits. Since he owned his own domain name, he used to give different e-mail addresses to different websites. This meant that he could quickly identify the source of an e-mail and block messages sent to those addresses if necessary. Although Baer decided that this approach was too complicated to be convenient for most users, OtherInbox still lets users give out multiple disposable e-mails if they choose, in addition to offering its automated analysis.
"OtherInbox is a rare startup that solves a very real, very urgent need of anyone who uses email." says Carla Thompson, a senior analyst for Guidewire Group, a firm that analyzes early-stage technology companies. She adds that she is impressed with how easy it is to set up the service, although the user interface could be adjusted to work faster and more smoothly. "I'm willing to wait for those improvements because it's my favorite kind of technology: it solves a real need without much thought or effort from me," she says.
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It's an operating model issue, not a technology issue
You may want to think about email overload as an operating cultural issue. Individual management of email is only going to accomplish so much. Rather, rethinking email as a collaboration tool (and an employee engagement tool) should cause executives to rethink the operating model that they use to manage intellectual assets such as employee contribution ... here's a write-up that might put context around thinking differently about the role that email should play in an organization
http://www.bis-insight.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2009/3/14_I_can_see_clearly_now_the_email_is_down.html
Another Way out of Email Overload
the entire problem of the email deluge is not about "email management" or more intelligent email filters. it is also about using mail for the wrong things - collaborating on files, task management, reaching a group consensus etc. a large chunk of emails are caused by these avoidable internal communications for which other tools are more suitable. we had recently done a white paper on this subject - http://www.hyperoffice.com/business-email-overload/
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dtutelman
117 Comments
Why?
As someone who prefers keeping my folders -- including my inbox -- on my computer rather than one of my webmail accounts, my first question was, "How do I convert this into folders on my machine rather than some web site?" The answer was immediately obvioius. Skip OtherInbox altogether, and just create some filters for my email reader. (I use Eudora, but all modern email readers support filtering.)
So I have to ask, what is it that OtherInbox offers that some pretty simple filters would not?
DaveT
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benhamill
1 Comment
Re: Why?
This wins over filters for a couple of reasons: One is that you don't have to create them. As soon as you hand out a new email address, OIB knows how to handle it when they get email to that address.
Also, if you create a filter based on the from address (say you subscribed to Wired magazine's emails) it won't catch emails from the same subscription but a different address (because they'll spam you with stuff about Vogue and whatever other magazines their parent company owns).
Thirdly, if you've handed out a unique email address to every site, you can just turn off that email address with a button-press, rather than unsubscribing and hoping it works or creating a filter to auto-trash emails from that person (and it not catching stuff if they sell your address or whatever).
Fourthly, I believe that OIB has or will have IMAP support, so you should be able to download all your mail to a desktop client. I haven't messed with it because that doesn't fit my personal work-flow, but it's a thing that's possible.
Seriously, give the free version a try. It's a hard thing to understand without having tried it.
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