A Way Out of E-mail Overload

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Credit: 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.