Want to keep all of your marketing offers (and spam) in a separate email account that is easy to manage? That’s the idea behind OtherInbox, a startup that launched at TechCrunch50. We have 500 invites for the private beta (get ‘em while they last).
As we wrote during the company’s launch last week:
Otherinbox tries to solve the problem of email overload. According to the company, it believes that as more people sign up for newsletters, product updates, and countless other services that send emails, inboxes are getting inundated with extras that reduce efficiency.
To solve that problem, users can sign up for OtherInbox (it’s free) and create vanity email addresses for different services. So if you want to receive product announcements from Amazon via email, set up an OtherInbox account called “amazon@yourname.otherinbox.com” and only emails from Amazon will be sent to that address. The same can be done for any place you input email addresses.
When you open OtherInbox, it features folders from every site you signed up with the different emails in a left pane. Once you decide which you want to read, simply click on the email box and you can view all emails sent to that address.
. . . To block spam messages, OtherInbox uses a “block” button, which will then delete all the spam in a particular inbox and deactivate that address so you won’t get anymore spam.
spamgourmet.com redux
still wondering how they make $
very useful… can’t wait for the invitation. Thanks for sharing.
Count me in for the private invite, please!
Gotta give up to Texas boys, but I already have this feature with e-mail forwarding.
mostly stupid idea. don’t we all have junk email accounts by now? what’s the benifit?
Dear Jim
There no stupid Ideas , just stupid people
You will never know if something has merit until you test it
It also may not be for you , but others may find it useful
this no place to belittle people or products
this is a place where we should just make intelligent assessments, based on our knowledge
Sorry William. This is a stupid idea.
So the way to avoid getting email you don’t want is getting another web account you probably don’t want either? Why not just hit “unsubscribe” to “add to block sender list”???
my “intellegent assesment” is that this is a stupid idea that will deadpool within a year.
“this no place to belittle people or products” … Have you ever read TechCrunch?
Belittling people and products is TC’s business model.
i concur my learned friend, this is indeed a stupid idea. Why set up another account (longer, i might add, because of the use of sub-domains), it should be a solution for the current usage of email, not an alternative.
It’s like using another cheaper car because you don’t want to get you’re good one dirty. Stupid idea, and stupid people. Kind of thing that looks good in a business plan for an MBA essay, not in real life.
Intelligent enough for you Mr. Lopez, or do you want a compare and contrast with gmail essay
Ummm, isn’t that what your Yahoo or Hotmail account became after you switched to gmail?
haha, very true
I’ll take one of those there private invites!
Um… you can also do this with you gmail account by doing:
username+amazon@gmail.com
Anything after the + is just there for filtering. Sounds like a solution looking for a problem
And for sites that don’t accept the plus sign, you can just insert periods into your username since Gmail ignores those. Then, you can use the To field to filter on. So if you have an account like johndoe@gmail.com, just register with an email like johndo.e@gmail.com and then setup a Gmail filter that says if the email was addressed to johndo.e@gmail.com, apply some label to it.
Filters very easily solve the problem so this service seems unnecessary. And for those that think it uses space in their account, it’s easy enough to create junk email accounts anyways.
Yeah. I do. And I have. For about 2 years. It’s called gmail.
of course you can use a catchall address, apparently even you gmail folks do it. what intrigues me about otherinbox is how easily it filters them by address. i dont want to waste my time creating new rules and folders if my computer can do it for me.
Thanks for all the comments! The idea of giving out different email addresses is similar to spamgourmet or using gmail “plus addresses” but it doesn’t stop there. OtherInbox saves a lot of time by automatically making the rules and folders for you. Also, the way it shows messages grouped by Sender is a lot faster than trying to read through all of the messages in one big list. I wrote more in this blog post: http://blog.oth...ot-use-gma.html
nah mate, still shit. Nice try joshua, i tried it out but your concept is only maginally different, and even less so useful. What is your killer proposition, if you have one?
Oh the waste of such good developers and their time, it could have been used on building something useful. I’m sure there’s people out there who have fantastic, viable ideas, but are not in the priveliged position of the ‘who you knows’ to make it a reality.
Seemingly minuscule feature differentiators that gmail or spamgourmet will happily copy (if they happen to be worth anything).
Seems like spammers could get around the blocking too once they realize that the back half of anything@yourrealname.otherinbox.com is the actual address. Good luck on monetizing.
thats correct, they’ll just look for the *.otherinbox.com for whether it’s active and then put the whole dictionary in front of the @ knowing you will get each and every one of thier offers for Ci4L1S. The subdomain is your identifier in the same way as *@domain.com was, all you’ve done is move it to the the other side.
You knobheads, come up with a decent use for daddy’s money and his rolodex of door-openers.
Exactly how hard do you think it is to detect something like that? You are belittling the product for something it already protects against.
http://blog.oth...the-spamme.html
Joshua
Be honest, how do you make money? I read it was that you sell this information on to email marketeers and retails sites so that they can target you with more ’specific’ spam – is that true?
I don’t get it – why would you sign up for something who’s business model is to become more of a spamtrap.
Gmail ftw…
I want one please
I want one, I want one!
http://www.SchoolShift.com
No one said you had to go through school alone.
I’m here for an invite… Thanks
Congratulations on the private invite launch! Looks like a great product with plenty of potential. Seems like your invites ran out really fast. Hopefully I can get one in the near future.
Jimmy
COO, GoPlanit.com
you can have mine, its shit
yes please. love the ui.
Invites have expired. What a bummer.
Anyway, a site that doesn’t support Internet Explorer, and is redundant to sites like mailinator.com and spamgourmet.com, and different physical accounts on free web sites …. cannot and will not survive. Period.
Looks like the invites are gone!
Any more coming up?
http://www.donationpeople.com
the easier way to contribute
I’ll take a beta invite if any are left. Thanks.
I was late. When will they have more?
I got in, this may come in handy for all the Beta sign ups on Techcrunch.
Some options work, others have a # for fake links…boo on new window to create a new messages, although I guess if you are only responding to “click” to activate your account emails then it’s not terribly bad.
How many tech crunch reporters switched to OtherInbox? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/WEfCmMJwvg_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”How many tech crunch reporters switched to OtherInbox? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/ovNUraBXKs”}}}
Will appreciate beta invite. Thanks.
Late? I just got 2 accounts
BTW, kinda weak that it won’t work on IE.
THere is definitely a need for a service like this. For years I’ve just used my own domain and given out separate email addresses for things I sign up for. Like amazon@mydomain.com for things i buy from amazon, ebay@mydomain.com for my ebay account. THen if someone starts spamming me I can shut the address off or reroute it easily. Google hosted services is the cheapest and easiest way to do this these days (google.com/a)
It isn’t a solution for spam although it can be. What I use it for is to cutdown on all those x has become friends with you or y is following you messages. It works fantastic for that.
Not sure about all the craze with the plus sign – might as well use underscore, dot or minus sign.
On the other hand, if your own web site sits on your own domain than there shouldn’t be any problems creating a forwarder. In fact, it’s even easier – you can always cut off spam going to that specific account without loosing any of the value…
Tried to sign up and got a “We’re sorry, OtherInbox only supports FireFox 3 and Safari 3.” message. Hey dumbasses. IE has 80% market share!!!
What’s the difference with Gmail filters in combination with Labels? It’s what I’ve been doing since 2004…
Tough crowd today.
It’s a bit buggy in Chrome. It shows the mail having arrived but doesn’t display the message.
Man ….all the good ideas seem to be dried up….now we have to have these super..super…mashups of mashups of web-services.
http://astore.a...n.com/excity-20
thx ES. very cool
I’ll use it cuz i got a very stealthy one and wont be afraid to use it and fill er up! But how will they make money, I wont pay!
Damn!! There are no invitations remains. Can i have one? Thanks!
This is what Mailshell attempted to do. Mailshell is no longer in business.
Why not just buy your own email domain?
I cloned spamgourmet’s services on my mail server, like so:
I sign up for an account with CrapCompany, i use this email:
crapcompany.secret-key@mydomain.com.
All email to my domain that doesn’t have a designated mailbox goes to a catch-all which gets filtered and if the “key” is matched then it’s routed to my real box, else it goes to the place email goes to DIE.
Works well.
I think this is a great service. I’m always nervous about giving out my email to sites that will probably sell them to spammers. I’ve got an inbox full of spam to prove it. I will probably use this service, seeing that it’s so convenient. I like that it allows you to set up separate email addresses for each sender and in turn organizes all your mail in different folders.
This isn’t a bad idea but you can already do this with gmail. I’m not going to say how to do it here because I’m sure this company will hate me for good if I do.
For a more innovative effort to tackle information overload check out http://www.nextfeeds.com, planned to launch soon.
Are there still any invites left? Can I have one?
Count me in please!?
Would really appreciate an invite.
I think is a GREAT idea! I can’t wait to use it, it will definately simplfy the overwhelming email and keep everything in one place instead of having to go to different places to check emails.
Would love an invite.
Thanks to everyone for your comments. Since we launched, we’ve had almost 10,000 users sign up and have received a ton of great feedback. We’ve added support for Internet Explorer and Chrome and we’re currently working on IMAP and iPhone support. Here are 100 more invites for those of you who missed out: http://beta.oth...nup/techcrunch5