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OtherInbox
Over the past few years, numerous services have sprung up to help users deal with e-mail overload. For example, a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook called Xobni enhances the software's search features and shows additional information about all the interactions between a user and her e-mail contacts. Another service, called NutshellMail, collects and organizes messages from different e-mail and social-networking accounts in one place. Baer says that what distinguishes his service is its attention to automated e-mails, which users probably want to receive but don't want to read every time they open their inbox.
Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of the Semantic Web company Radar Networks and a judge on an awards panel at SXSW, says that OtherInbox could certainly be useful for reducing e-mail clutter. However, Spivack wonders whether users will find that the e-mail is out of sight and out of mind, and hence will simply stop reading automated messages. He adds that the service might be more practical if it were contained within an existing e-mail account instead of in another inbox.
While the first step is to get automated e-mails organized and out of the user's inbox, Baer says that machine-learning algorithms allow OtherInbox to do smarter things, such as recognize upcoming events and automatically creating calendar entries for them. In the future, he says, the service will also recognize and file receipts received from online retailers. "From a machine-learning perspective, the automated e-mail is the good stuff," Baer says.
The basic service offered by OtherInbox is free, but the company plans to make money by also offering a premium option. Among other things, the premium service will let users store e-mails for longer periods. The company may also use the information that it collects to provide marketers with aggregate data on customer behavior--for example, which marketing e-mails are most often read by users. However, Baer stresses that the company does not intend to share information about individual users. He adds that OtherInbox will offer integration with Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Outlook later this year.
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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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