OtherInbox - the cure for email overload!

Nominate OtherInbox for a Crunchie award!

If you think that OtherInbox is innovative, the best startup, best design or more, nominate us for a Crunchie award!

How can we improve our community even more?

My name is Leah Chaney, and I'm your new OtherInbox Community Manager. I'm looking forward to focusing on the community of OtherInbox users. OtherInbox is dedicated to listening to our community, and I encourage you to follow us on Twitter, check us out on facebook, and read our blog.

If you have technical questions or suggestions, please visit our support site, and one of our team members or someone from our user community will be eager to help you. You can also contribute to the community by sharing ideas or starting a discussion. I am very passionate about community involvement and the power of user suggestions. Please stay tuned for new and exciting enhancements to your OtherInbox account. I look forward to working for you!

Regards,

Leah Chaney

Great video screen cast from Liz B Davis

Liz B. Davis just posted a wonderful 2 and a half minute video screen cast about how she uses OtherInbox. Take a look!

Another OtherInbox baby!

Please help us welcome another OtherInbox baby, Mikaela Vail Baer. She was born on election day which has already set high expectations for her political career. We're not quite sure, but Mikaela may be the first person to have a Facebook and Twitter account while in-utero!

Vote for OtherInbox in the Mashable Open Web Awards!

What a great example of a place to use your OtherInbox address! Enter mashable_open_web_awards@yourname.otherinbox.com as your address!

It's better to change your email address than to unsubscribe

From a consumer's perspective, it's usually safer and will result in less email if you change your email address to a bogus one such as nobodyhome@nobody.com than to click on the unsubscribe link. Sometimes the only option is to unsubscribe, but many times you will also see an option to "update your email address" or change your "account settings" and you can change your email address from the real one to anything else that you want.

Unsubscribing usually consists of clicking an unsubscribe link, typing in your email address, and then clicking to unsubscribe one more time.

Updating your email address usually consists of logging into your account, going to the account settings page and entering your new email address. Sometimes you'll be required to confirm your new email address by clicking on a link in an email.

Both changing your email and unsubscribing should stop the immediate messages from coming, but using the unsubscribe link has more risk because the marketer could decide to email you again later or could give your email address to someone else (accidentally or on purpose).

When you unsubscribe, your email address is either deleted or it is saved in a "suppression list" so that know not to send you email in the future. This file gets stored in the email software and can be accessed by the system administrators and the marketers who operate the business. If one of those people has bad intentions they can steal the list and sell it to spammers. Ex-employees are also a common source of list theft.

When your address is laying around in a suppression list, it is susceptible to being abuses or hacked (safer if the list owner uses MD5). Even if all of the employees act appropriately, many businesses have poor practices that expose suppression lists to theft and abuse.

In order to comply with the national CAN-SPAM law, the suppression list must be shared with third parties in order to make sure they don't send email to users who have previously unsubscribed. While the intent is good, many suppression lists are shared in an insecure way that makes it easy for spammers to steal the lists of email addresses and send them spam.

The result is that you get more spam after unsubscribing because you email address is put on the suppression list and then the suppression list gets stolen by spammers. It's kind of ironic, but it happens every day. For the most recent examples, just ask our friends over at Lashback.

In the worst case, the list owner may use your unsubscribe request as a signal to send you more email. This is illegal and I don't think its very common, but its still something that many users are concerned about.

When you change or update your email address (if that option is available) your old email address is usually replaced by the new one. It's an edge case that most people haven't spent much time thinking about.

In almost every mailing list software that I know of, changing your email address actually overwrites the old one with the the new. This means there is usually no record of the old email address at all. Maybe its in a log file that will get deleted after 30 days. But its not put anywhere that gets saved permanently or shared with other marketing companies.

All mailing list software used to work like this, in the days before spam and suppression lists. The early software packages were MLMs such as Majordomo and Listserv. The subscriber email addresses were stored in files (today most are stored in databases) and unsubscribing actually deleted your email address from the file.

Then database solutions such as Lyris came out and they didn't delete email addresses that unsubscribed, they just marked the record as unsubscribed and made sure to never send email to email addresses marked unsubscribe. This was good because it helped with reporting and protected against accidentally re-importing an address that had previously unsubscribed. But it's bad from the consumer's perspective because it means that your email address is hanging around permanently.

Then CAN-SPAM came along and made it a requirement that unsubscribed email addresses be saved forever. This was also done with good intentions - in an attempt to protect the consumer from receiving unwanted advertisements. But the result is that email addresses are kept permanently instead of being deleted, the lists are shared between different companies, and this creates additional risk for the user.

And this risk is not theoretical! Suppression lists get stolen every day. One of the most common ways is through affiliate networks that post suppression lists on FTP servers as plain text files rather than using MD5 encrypted files or hosting their suppression files securely at UnsubCentral. A spammer can just sign up for an account at an affiliate network, download millions of email addresses in suppression lists, and send them tons of spam. I tried this out at a large email affiliate network and within 24 hours had downloaded 10 million email addresses.

Those of you who know me from my days at SKYLIST, UnsubCentral, Datran Media, and the Email Service Provider Coalition may be surprised to hear me say that. After all, I've always been a strong proponent of unsubscribe standardization and best practices.

I don't think this is in conflict with my previous statements. It's just focused on a different perspective. From the marketers perspective, they should do everything they can to build consumer trust, protect consumer privacy, and comply with the law. From the user's perspective, they should do everything they can to protect themselves. They owe no allegiance to the marketers.

Am I suggesting that people should always take the time to update their email address to nobodyhome@nobody.com instead of unsubscribing? No I'm not. It just wouldn't be worth the extra effort. But if you are subscribing from something that looks particularly spammy and they give you an option to change your email address instead of just unsubscribing, you might consider doing that instead.

Of course, if you have an OtherInbox account you don't need to worry about this because you can always turn off that address to safely unsubscribe and easily avoid any future messages no matter what happens to the suppression list.

Store notes about each Mailbox

I often find myself wanting to jot down a quick note to remember my username for a website or to keep track of refunds I'm waiting for. Thanks to Jeff, the newest member of our development team, you can now store notes about each Mailbox in your OtherInbox.

To add a note, double-click on the Mailbox that you want to associate this note with. On the Mailbox Settings page, you can enter a short note and click Save.

From the Messages view of your Inbox, if you hover the mouse over a Mailbox that has a note, a small box will pop up that displays the note. You can always view or edit the note by double-clicking on the Mailbox again.

Special thanks goes out to our users on Get Satisfaction who suggested this idea and voted for it. We really appreciate all of the feedback and we are listening carefully!

Great video review at AllAboutTheBetas.tv

Tony at AllAboutTheBetas.tv did a great introductory video about OtherInbox. It's only two and a half minutes long - take a look!

Automatically organize your Yahoo Groups and mailing lists

With Yahoo Groups and Google Groups, it can be tedious to assign different email addresses to each group and Yahoo has a limit of 10 total email addresses per account. Instead, you can just use one email address for your Yahoo account such as yahoo@yourname.otherinbox.com and another for your Google account such as google@yourname.otherinbox.com. OtherInbox is smart enough to recognize the mailing list Messages and route them to a separate Mailbox for each list.

This currently works for Google Groups, Yahoo Groups and many mailing list software packages such as Mailman and Lyris. Messages from each "list" are routed to a different Mailbox. That Mailbox will work like any other Mailbox - you can rename it, change it's priority, set up forwarding, and more.

How does it work? Mailing list software includes a List-ID header that uniquely identifies the mailing list. OtherInbox looks for that header and uses it to decide which Mailbox to put the Messages into.

You can turn this feature on from Settings -> Filters. It's turned off by default because it is such a new feature, but once we have tested it more and received your feedback we'll turn it on for everyone.

SproutCore and the future of web applications

We use a relatively new JavaScript framework to power OtherInbox message viewing inside your web browser called SproutCore. I've begun giving a series of SproutCore talks, explaining how the framework allows you to build client-server web applications, and what this means for the future of the web. I'll be giving this talk and doing SproutCore demos at Austin-on-Rails on 11/25/08.

Bryan Liles was good enough to take a video of my talk at Baltimore on Rails in October. Check it out below:

View the movie

The slides I use in the beginning are on slideshare.

Forbes says Austin is the best Bang for the Buck!

Forbes magazine ranked Austin the best Bang for the Buck in the country, with San Antonio number 2 and both Dallas and Houston in the top 10. With a low cost of living, strong job market and low inflation, Texas is looking very attractive!

Not only that, but Austin is also the city with the highest percentage of bloggers and digeratti.

If you're living in the bay area or NYC you might want to take a look at opportunities in Austin!

Come see us at Innotech in Austin on Thursday

If you haven't seen the OtherInbox demo in person, here is your chance! Come to the Innotech conference Beta Summit in Austin to meet me and see the demo in person. We're the first company presenting at 11am and we will have a booth in the exhibitor space.

Please stop by and say hi! If you're an OtherInbox user, I'd love to meet you and hear about how you are using OtherInbox. If you have heard about OtherInbox and are skeptical, this is a great opportunity to get your questions answered and talk to other users.

OtherInbox goes back to school... community service day at Govalle Elementary

Today, OtherInbox joined with other local companies such as AdLucent, Austin Ventures, BazaarVoice, Dell, Earnst & Young, Vincent & Elkins and GiveToAustin by volunteering at Govalle Elementary school in East Austin.

We painted, planted trees, painted inside, adding landscaping, and more! OtherInbox is committed to playing our part in our local community and in the world. We do a company community service day four times a year, which works out to about 1% of our working time. And we're hiring!

Click on the image to view more photos on our Facebook page. Please become a fan of OtherInbox on Facebook!

Who uses OtherInbox the mostest?

Congratulations to the top 20 OtherInbox users! Besides Mike and I, these users have given out the most OtherInbox addresses and have received the most email. There are a lot of my friends and family on there who have been using OtherInbox for about a year, but there are a handful of newcomers as well!

1. Ivor Clarke
   
2. Cyan Banister
   
3. Amy Baer
   
4. Ryan Pitylak
   
5. John Engler
   
6. Bijoy Goswami
   
7. Evan Alter
   
8. Aaron Scruggs
   
9. Joleen Sanborn
   
10. Rand Wacker
    
11. Bobby Potter
    
12. Ben Humphry
    
13. Ross Miller
    
14. Bradley Dean
    
15. Jesse Brede
    
16. Chris Hyams
    
17. Brandon Phillips
    
18. Arthur Meyerovich
    
19. Erica Tello
    
20. Matt Buck

Everyone on this list has given out more than 100 OtherInbox addresses!

p.s. Bjorn, Mason and Neelan - you are so close!

Gmail users like OtherInbox

Apparently Gmail users like OtherInbox. More than half of the signups have come from Gmail accounts.

It's really not that surprising because Gmail users are early adopters and power users who are more likely to be attracted to OtherInbox.

OtherInbox works great as a companion to Gmail! Gmail is really good at handling your conversations with people, but you don't really have conversations with Amazon.com or with your Twitter notifications. Let Gmail handle your emails with real people, and let OtherInbox handle everything else. Spend most of your time in Gmail and only check OtherInbox once or twice a day.

Just like Gmail is designed to handle conversations, OtherInbox is designed to handle commercial email, newsletters, and social networking notifications. They go together like peanut butter and jelly!

OtherInbox is my personal assistant

We normally hear from Colin Anawaty on Twitter as pxlpshr but he was kind enough to write us an email telling us how OtherInbox has saved him time and gotten the clutter out of his Gmail account!

"I have numerous user profiles across countless social websites. The sheer volume of email many of these sites serve in a single day kept four Gmail accounts flooded and practically unusable. I found OtherInbox on TechCrunch 50 and spent a few minutes converting my email at sites I visit regularly.

"OtherInbox now feels more like a personal assistant than an email service. Let me explain. When I converted my email account at each of the major social sites I visit, I also turned on additional notifications. I know, it sounds crazy right? From that day forward the time I have spent combing through the social web has been cut in half. Thanks to OtherInbox's intuitive sorting method, more email has become a significant time-saver as I'm no longer visiting each site independently to check my profile and get updates about my friends!

"And as you can see from my bookmark toolbar in Safari, OtherInbox is one of the first sites I now visit and a fantastic alternative to "Open All in Tabs".

Huge thanks to the OtherInbox team for such a great product!

Thanks for the kind words Colin! I promise this is just the beginning... lots more to come over the next few months!

Custom domain registration, IMAP import, and RSS

On Friday we pushed out the weekly update and already we've seen a number of imports and a few domain registrations. We have a new "loading..." screen, performance improvements, and RSS is back to stay!

Custom Domain Registration

Now you can register a custom, personal domain name to use with OtherInbox! By default every user gets a free domain such as johnsmith.otherinbox.com. For $10 you can purchase your own domain name from within OtherInbox and we will configure everything for you automatically. You don't need to know anything about HTML or DNS. $10/year is the total charge including domain registration.

To buy your domain, click the Settings button at the top of the screen, select the Domains tab on the left, and then click Add a New Domain. Then type in the name of the domain you're interested in and it will tell if you the domain name is available or not. Finally, it will ask for payment via credit card or PayPal.

If you already have a domain name and are comfortable configuring DNS records, you can add it to OtherInbox by clicking "Add your existing domain".

IMAP Import

This allows you to import old messages from your existing IMAP account. Your password is not saved on the server and nothing is changed in your IMAP account.

What does happen is that it checks your IMAP account for messages from senders that you would typically want in your OtherInbox, such as Amazon, eBay and Facebook and copies them into your OtherInbox. Right now its pretty simple but we're going to make it a lot more sophisticated over time.

To try it out, go to the Settings button at the top right and then click on the Import Mail tab at the left. Enter your IMAP account information and click Import. Because the import can take a few minutes, we take you back to the Messages view and it runs in the background. As new mail is imported, you will see new Mailboxes and Messages appear. You will you see an alert message at the top of the screen when the import is complete.

RSS Feeds

RSS is back! You can get an RSS feed of all your unread messages as well as saved, deleted and blocked. You can also get a unique RSS feed for each mailbox. What can you do with this? You can read your OtherInbox mail in your RSS reader. Or you create an email address, sign it up for a bunch of stuff, and then create an aggregated feed for yourself or to share with others. For example, I created an address for Google Alerts about OtherInbox and then shared the feed with everyone else in the company. I can't wait to hear what other mashups and cool uses you all think of!

Drag and Drop Messages

You can now drag and drop Messages from the Message List to a different Mailbox. For example, when I get a PayPal receipt to my paypal@ address, I usually drag it to the Mailbox for the website that I actually purchased from. Only this one message is affected - future messages will be delivered normally.

Performance Improvements

Besides those big things, we have made numerous small tweaks and improvements. We are constantly working to make the user interface faster and more responsive. We're also working behind the scenes on longer term projects around receipts, the calendar, IMAP server support and more.

Stay tuned - more is coming next week!

Interview with Josh about the beginnings of OtherInbox

I'm reposting an interview with Bryan Menell from AustinStartup.com. Subscribe to their feed for all the latest news about the Austin startup scene!

Q: How did you get the original idea for OtherInbox?

Back at Carnegie Mellon, the computer system had a feature where I could add a plus “+” onto the end of my email address and any other text I wanted after it, and it would still come to my Inbox. If I created a folder with the same text as what came after the plus, messages would go into that folder automatically. So I created joshuabaer+shopping@cmu.edu and joshuabaer+travel@cmu.edu, etc.

Soon after, I founded SKYLIST, one of the first Email Service Providers. SKYLIST helps some of the largest companies in the world to send their email marketing, including CNN, Disney, Microsoft, NASCAR, NBC and Sony. In 1998 I authored a technical standard to help consumers unsubscribe from email newsletters and groups that has been adopted by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and thousands of other companies. A few years later I founded UnsubCentral, which helps email marketing companies to manage compliance with the national CAN-SPAM law.

Working with SKYLIST and UnsubCentral customers I gained a both deep and broad understanding of spam. I experienced the growth of spam from the perspective of person receiving email, a marketer sending email, and a network admin trying to block spam. I realized that some of the tricks I used back in college could be the foundation for a shifting the balance of power in the war against spam.

Q: How long have you been working on the website before your beta launch at the TechCrunch50?

I built the first prototype last fall, but I’ve been doing one version of this or another since I was in college at CMU. OtherInbox was officially incorporated in January 2008.

Q: Why start this company in Austin? Were you able to find enough talent here to implement your vision?

I came to Austin to work for Trilogy software and fell in love with the city. When Austin was recently rated the “most online” city in the country full of bloggers and early adopters, it only re-enforced that this was the perfect place to build our company.

OtherInbox is built on Ruby on Rails, a cutting-edge new programming environment for websites. Austin has a strong Ruby on Rails community and we’ve been able to attract a team of wicked smart developers who are passionate about stopping spam.

Fortunately, OtherInbox is a pretty easy place to attract great workers - it’s a fun startup environment with a sexy consumer product that everyone can understand. We’ve got a great office downtown, competitive pay, great benefits, stock options and a sense of community that make this one of the best places to work in Austin. And we’re still hiring programmers, interns, product managers and more!

Q: You’ve secured some incredible angel investors. Tell us a little bit about who you have investing and advising OtherInbox?

Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve remained connected to pretty much every company that I’ve worked for or started. I incubated OtherInbox at Datran Media, the company that acquired my last 2 companies. Then I was fortunate to get Joe Liemandt of Trilogy Software’s support as an angel investor and advisor - and its Joe that brought me to Austin out of college. And I’m always glad to have my good friend Brett Hurt to turn to as an advisor.

Q: Where do you see OtherInbox going? Any hints on future OtherInbox functionality?

The number of people who use the internet for news, shopping and social networking is just going up. The amount of email we get from everything online and even some offline things is just going up. Many of us already have too much email now, and we’re just going to get more and more. Having unlimited email addresses helps with the spam problem, but there is much more to OtherInbox than spam protection.

Most of the email messages in your OtherInbox are sent by computers. Each email is an automated response to something you did or things other people did on the web - for example receipts, shipping notices, coupons, statements, newsletters, etc. Most of those email messages are formatted the same way. Wouldn’t it be great if a computer could do something smart with the emails sent by all these other computers and you didn’t have to deal with it?

One track mind

I just ordered the license plate for my Tesla roadster set to arrive in November. TESLA and PLUGIN were taken, so I went with a different word very dear to my heart, EMAIL!

IE and Chrome support, invitations to share

It's been three weeks since we launched at TechCrunch50 and what a ride it's been! We've been covered by 4 of the top 5 blogs in the world and were mentioned in the Washington Post twice! More than 7,000 people have signed up for the private beta and almost 40,000 OtherInbox addresses have been used.

It feels so good to hear the excitement from new users! We have more than 500 followers on Twitter @otherinbox, hundreds of users on our Google group, and tons of great feature suggestions on GetSatisfaction.

Expanded Browser Support

We're working hard to be responsive to user feedback and plan on releasing new versions of the service every week on Thursday or Friday. This past week we released support for Internet Explorer and Chrome (in addition to Firefox and Safari), performance tweaks, and the ability to create new mailboxes manually.

Exclusive Beta Invitations

This week we also gave every user three invitations to share with a friend! If you look in the upper right-hand corner of the screen you'll see a new "invite friends" link. You can share OtherInbox with a friend who you think has email overload and could use the cure. But use them carefully - you only have three!

What's coming up next?

We're hard at work on new features for OtherInbox - both big and small! What you see now is just the beginning of our vision and we are hard at work on major new functionality in addition to little tweaks we make in response to user feedback. Some of the things you can expect to see in the next month are an iPhone version of the website, RSS support, and an import wizard to consolidate email from your previous email accounts.

Your input is really important in deciding what we do next! Please visit our GetSatisfaction site at help.otherinbox.com and click to vote for features that are most important to you! Each week we're going to pick one of the features with the most votes.