After the recent introduction of our new Yahoo! Mail integration, we have been hard at work on new features. Today, we would like to announce the automatic filtering of mailing list messages from Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, and other mailing lists. Also, we have upgraded our filters for Yahoo! Mail and Gmail to automatically group Craigslist messages as well.

Whether you are using Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or the Yahoo! Mail application Organizer, it's easy to have your mailing list messages groups by list or your Craigslist emails organized by post.

Personally, I have found a lot of value with the Craigslist filters. When I post several items for sale, it can get confusing when people reply to all of my postings at the same time. With OtherInbox's filters, my Craigslist messages are organized into separate mailboxes for each item.

Customize OIB to filter even more messages in Yahoo! Mail

A few weeks ago, we announced the ability to customize OIB to filter even more messages in your Gmail account. Now, we are happy to also state that customizing OIB to filter messages in Yahoo! Mail is also available as well! It's as easy as dropping a message into a folder.

Okay they aren't really X-rated... 

Over the last few months, OtherInbox has added several cool features, and I want to make sure you are getting the most out of it.  Whether you were one of the first beta testers or have just heard about it, there is probably something that will save you time in one of these videos. Click on the ones that are applicable to you, or watch them all!  We would appreciate it if you would share these videos with anyone you know who might need a little help with email overload.

As always, thank you for your support!

(To view videos full size click on each screencast)

Connect OIB to your Gmail in 3 simple steps!

Connect OIB to your Yahoo! email

Go premium!

In addition to keeping you organized and in control of your inbox again, OtherInbox has many additional perks.  I wanted to share a few of the ways I use OtherInbox to help me manage my work, hobbies, volunteer activities, family, shopping, and even vacations.

How OIB helps me with my job

I’ve had many superusers tell me that OIB has helped them with their careers.  Several professionals, from hairdressers to leasing agents, have reported ways that giving on the fly email addresses and having organized mailboxes have made them more efficient and organized.  As the Community Manager of OtherInbox, I use on the fly email addresses to help me with networking, partnership activities, user feedback, and volunteer organizations that we work with every quarter.  I give each group their own email address, where they are all nicely organized and easy to access in one place, my OtherInbox account. 

My own personal encyclopedia of knowledge

I, like many people, have a lot of things I wish I knew how to do.  Being a full time employee of an awesome startup and a full time parent does not give me a lot of extra time to take classes and lessons.  However, in the last year I have managed to learn how to start my first garden, enhance my cooking skills, and stay up to date on the newest social media trends!  How did I find the time to do all that?  I signed up for the latest newsletters, blogs, and social groups like Ning and had them all go to my OtherInbox!  It’s like customizing your own virtual newspaper and reading it when you want to without it EVER overwhelming your primary inbox.

My pond

Coupons and other money saving tips

We all love a good bargain but not at the expense of giving out our email address.  It is not worth overpopulating your inbox with spam and risking it being sold to other companies.  My absolute favorite part of having an OtherInbox is the ability to be fearless with my email address.  I use an on the fly email to sign up for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING I want.  It has become an obsession.  I sign up for all of my favorite stores' newsletters, contests, and everything else I can.  As a result, I get a ton of free stuff.  Free food, free books, and coupons to all my favorite stores.  I still have not won anything, but I check my OtherInbox daily to make sure.  It is kind of like playing the internet lottery - for free!  Now, as you can imagine, I get spammed all the time, but I don’t stress about it because I have the power to keep spammers from ever emailing me again with just one click.  I have also learned who leaks my email address out and will never spend another dime in their stores or online with them.

All this money saving has made me want a vacation

Although I have not yet saved thousands with OtherInbox, I still use it to sign up for travel sites and possible vacation destinations.  My OtherInbox notifies me of flight deals, discount vacation packages, and much more.  When it is time to pack up the family and head out of Dodge for a week or two, I know just where to go to get the most bang for my buck!

What do you do with your OtherInbox?

While I hope some of this information was helpful, I am always amazed by the creative ways other people use OIB to their advantage.  Share your story with us, and email me at myoib[at]LChaney.oib.com…oh look, I used it again ;).

We need your help growing our fan base on Facebook.  We have almost 3,000 followers on Twitter but only 372 followers on Facebook.  Now how are we supposed to save the world from email overload with only 372 people following us on Facebook?!

As an incentive to follow us, and to help us get other followers, we are going to be giving away one free premium account per week to one of our Facebook friends!  We will also have t-shirt giveways, contests, and much more!

If you retweet this message, we will enter you in to win a free premium upgrade.  If you already have a year of premium service, we will add an additional year to your contract!

Thank you for helping us continue to grow.  We are ready to take on email overload around the world! Ready, set, RT!

Follow us on Facebook!

The OtherInbox team has been hard at work making improvements based on the feedback we have received from you on help.oib.com and creating some cool, new features to help you continue to fight email overload.

Connect your OtherInbox account to Yahoo! Mail

Existing users can now sync their Yahoo! Mail accounts through OtherInbox directly. To sync to your Yahoo! Mail follow these steps or view this video:

1. Click "Settings" at the upper right hand corner 
2. Click on "Yahoo" in the left navigation bar
3. Click "Authorize OtherInbox"
4. Sign in with your Yahoo! Mail credentials

We're still working on enabling the Yahoo Organizer Application for existing users - please bear with us!

Connecting to both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail Requires a Premium Subscription

If you want to connect OtherInbox to BOTH a Gmail account AND a Yahoo! Mail account it requires a premium subscription that costs $19.99/year. In the future, you'll also be able to connect a single OtherInbox account to more than one Gmail or Yahoo account.

Summaries are now called Digests

We're transitioning to using the word "digests" instead of "summaries" for the daily email you get. It will take another sprint to get all of the changes in but we're going to start using that terminology from now on.

Get a Digest for any Mailbox on a Daily, Weekly or Monthly schedule

Now you can receive email digests for individual mailboxes on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. By default, OtherInbox will not send you individual mailbox digests - just the global digest across all your mailboxes.  You can change this by:

1. Click "Settings" at the upper right hand corner
2. Click "Mailboxes" in the left navigation bar
3. Scroll down and click on the mailbox title you wish to customize
4. Next to "Deliver my summary" choose the frequency you wish to receive

More behind the scenes

In addition to the new features listed above, we've done a lot of work to speed things up and fix some pesky bugs! 

Please try out the new Yahoo! Mail integration and turn on a weekly digest for that mailbox that piles up but you don't often check. Tell us in the comments what you think!

OtherInbox would like to give a shout out to our top 10 active users.  We based this list off number of emails organized and who checked their emails in the last 14 days.  We would like to thank everyone on this list for their support.  If you are on this list and would like me to link your name to your twitter account or blog, please email the link to top10@LChaney.oib.com!

Without further ado, here are the top 10:

1. Brandon Hubbard
2. Thomas Terry
3. Ganesh Ram Jayaraman
4. Mister Dondi
5. Luthiano Vasconcelos
6. Earl Wallace
7. Justine Lam
8. Yoshiro Moriyama
9.  Mansi Bhatia
10. Jack Humphrey

This question was recently posted on our support site.

I am already syncing between OIB and Gmail - seems to work well! However, there are additional vendors that are sending messages to my gmail account that I would like to have harvested by OIB. How can I tell OIB to also grab those messages?
—halindrome

By connecting your OtherInbox to your existing email account, OIB automatically filters out automated messages from some of the most popular online stores, newsletters, and social networks. Our users have seen their inboxes shrink as OIB leaves your real inbox for real people.

However, the diversity of our users means there are probably messages from many other websites who send messages that clog their inboxes. Add in OIB users from other countries and we have learned there are so many social networks and online stores that we had never heard of before.

We could attempt to identify every single one of these messages, but we would likely never be able to recognize every single site that sends messages we would like to organized. So, we knew that we would need to come up with a way for OIB users to customize which messages they would like OIB to filter out for them. Our latest feature is a way to do just that. It's as simple as labeling a message in Gmail!

To find out more about this new feature, please take a look at this question that is posted on our support site. As always, please feel free to post any problems, questions, or suggestions you have for us. We appreciate your feedback!

One of my favorite features with OtherInbox is that it allows me to sign up for EVERYTHING I want to with ease.  Like most people, I love a good deal, and using OtherInbox proves there IS such a thing as a free lunch.  Every week, I find amazing deals and coupons for something free just waiting for me in my organized mailboxes.  I usually share these finds with friends and family, but I want to do more. 

Some of our users have shared these amazing finds from their OIB on twitter, and we do our best to retweet these when they come up.  However, I think we can do better than that.  I would like to ask you all to join us in using #OIBFreebie on twitter when you find something cool or free in your OtherInbox.  Then people can just search for free deals, and we can share our treasures with each other.

Feel free to share them any day of the week as well!

Do you have experience converting Apps?  Are you familiar with OtherInbox? We need your help! We also want your help with merchant lists, outreach, and troubleshooting.

Get early access to all our new features, free premium upgrades, and much more!

This month we are looking for help with the following countries:

* India
* Australia
* Brazil
* Mexico
* Taiwan

We are also looking for:

•    UK
•    France
•    Germany
•    Netherlands
•    Etc..
We will be updating many more, so feel free to reach out if your country is not listed yet.

Gracias
Obrigada
Merci
Thank you!

This post was guest-written by Superuser Chip Riley.

Follow chipriley on twitter.

I happened to come across OIB while searching Twitter during SXSW.  I have two Google App accounts, one for personal and one for business, and I was constantly under bombardment from mailing lists and various Web2.0 service emails. 

OIB saved my inbox and allowed me to organize (via custom email addresses) and cut out the spam quickly and easily.  I actually replied to a user on GetSatisfaction that was complaining about OIB and how it "took over" his email.  I gave an example of how the service can allow you to weed out the spam (youdontgetit[at]myname.oib.com) and, lo and behold, got hit with some spam at that address a couple of weeks later.  I was able to block the address and never worry about it again.

Also, as an Austinite, I love seeing local businesses do great and wonderful things!!!

Congratulations to our “Mailbox Full of Cash” winners, Nita and Lois! We had the pleasure of meeting them at our office this week and took a few pictures with them. They are a wonderful and deserving Mother and Daughter team! Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest.
 

Come out and enjoy a day at Austin’s door64 Tech Fair Thursday April 30th.  OtherInbox will have a booth set up and will be giving out some T-Shirts and demos of our newest features.  This is a first-of-a-kind grassroots event with a great potential for networking and being involved in what the Austin Business Journal recently quoted as “The No.1 city for job growth potential”.

The door64 Tech Fair will be at the Goodwill Center located at 1015 Norwood Park Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78753 on Thursday April 30th, from 11am until 4pm.  There will be panel discussions and even a party following the Tech Fair.  For more information and to RSVP for this event please, visit http://door64.com/techfair.

If you follow us on twitter, please @otherinbox and let us know you will be there. We would love for some of our current users to show their support by wearing an OIB T-Shirt and would like some of you to come by our booth to speak to potential new OIB users. Please help us get the word out there about this event and RT this blog.

If you are attending and would like to speak at our booth or help us demo OtherInbox, please email door64[at]LChaney.oib.com.

Dear OtherInbox,

I'd just like to thank-you for your great product!

I am a sproutcore developer, and first heard about your product through that channel, as you were developing it. I was immediately intrigued by the idea of having many email addresses to hand out. I've attempted to do this before with gmail and the "+" (ie myname+otherinbox[at]gmail.com), that failed horribly, as most email inputs don't accept '+'s.

One of my first reactions when starting to use OIB, was "oh, not another email to have to check", but I found almost right away, that you had struck just the right balance in sending out daily summaries, and notices of the first email to the account. Now I find myself checking my OIB with out even thinking.

I now have a gmail address that only gets emails that I really need to action right away, and everything else is neatly filed away for me to read in my own time. Genius!
I shared this with my work mates who also have lots of email, what got them interested is the gmail syncing, such a great idea, no need to have to hand out new addresses to all the sites already signed up for.

I've seen OIB develop from near the very start, and I'm very impressed with the way that you've handled bugs and feature requests. The choice of Sproutcore as the tech to use was, by far, the right one!

Thanks for OIB!

A very grateful user,

Geoffrey D.

If you have an OtherInbox premium account connected to your gmail, follow us on twitter and facebook, and contribute to our question and answer site at help.oib.com, you are a Superuser.  I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who continue to support us by tweeting, offering feedback and suggestions, and being an active part of our community of users.  Some of you have followed us from the beginning, and some of you have recently joined.  However, all of you have been a huge part of our success.

I strongly believe that having a service that is useful and being a part of a solution are the only real advertising you need.  With OtherInbox we strive to make our product the way you want it.  We have an active community on help.oib.com that contributes to our roadmap and lets us know when there is an issue that needs to be fixed.  If you are not already, please help us by commenting and giving your feedback.

I would also like to ask you all for a favor.  If you are a fan of OtherInbox, tell as many people as you can about us today.  Help us get the word out there about curing email overload.  Your blog posts and tweets are a huge part of our success. 

If you are a Superuser, please submit your story and your reason for using OtherInbox to superuser[at]LChaney.oib.com. We will be sending out some t-shirts to some of our Superusers as a thank you from all of us at OtherInbox!

This morning on my way to work, I was listening to NPR.  A segment came on air about the recent rise in spam due to the mortgage crisis.  With many people worried about losing their homes and desperate to provide for their families, spammers are taking advantage of this time to steal your identity AND your money.  Right now, spammers are targeting this group of people to send them messages about mortgage protection packages and other scams that are designed to sound as legit as possible and to make people think it is a way of protection.

 Most of us read this and think, “Well, I would never fall for that.”  The problem is that we all know someone who might.  OtherInbox’s primary focus is to help you control email overload.  We do have other cool features like on the fly emails, blocking spam, and identifying who is selling or leaking your email address, but our main OIB users tend to be more technical in nature.  Our premium model and our feature roadmap focus on these more technical people and their needs. However, OIB’s simplicity and ease of use make it an ideal way for the people in our lives who are not as “tech savvy” to protect themselves from situations like the scam above. 

If you know someone who needs this protection, tell them about OtherInbox, and show them how to make special email addresses for things they sign up for and how easy it is to identify spam in these customized mailboxes. Feel free to share your funny spam headlines and stories with @mrspam on twitter!

OtherInbox is honored to have made the Webware 100 finals this year under Communication!

Please take a moment to click the icon below and vote for us. You can vote once a day. Voting ends on April 30th!

While OIB focuses on helping you control email overload, OIB offers several other cool things that most of our early beta testers enjoy.  One of my personal favorites is being able to make up an email address on the fly when I sign up for something new that I don’t want to go to my personal email.

For example, while I was at SXSWi, I found a lot of cool prize giveaways, newsletters, and blogs to sign up for.  Before OtherInbox, I would have passed on most of these, if not all of them, for fear of filling up my email.  OtherInbox allows me to be fearless with my email addresses, so I can sign up for all of the above and never have it touch my main email.  For every prize giveaway, I signed up with the address prize@myname.oib.com, and for all the cool companies I signed up with, I used something like opera@myname.oib.com.  When these companies email me, the email goes to a specialized mailbox under the company name to help me remember who each email is from. If I win one of those prizes (keep your fingers crossed), it will show up under my mailbox labeled “prize”.

Another cool thing about creating email addresses on the fly is that you can use them for networking.  Going back to my SXSWi example, I gave everybody I met that was interested in partnership opportunities the email address partnership@myname.oib.com.  Several potential job candidates came by, and I gave them jobs@myname.oib.com.  It’s not that I don’t think these people are important enough to go into my “real” inbox, but this helps me remember where we met and how I can best help them.  When you are at a conference or other event where you meet hundreds of people, this is a great tool for remembering and organizing contacts.

A good friend of mine is an artist who likes to sell paintings in public places like coffee shops.  In the past, giving out her real email has been a hassle.  With OtherInbox, not only can she be fearless in giving out her email to total strangers, but she can use the tricks above to find out where she is getting the most response from possible buyers.  She sets up email addresses using the names of the shops where she is displaying her work to help her track the “hot spots” for her business.  I have another friend who cuts hair for extra cash while she is getting back to full-time work.  She gives out one email for booking@hername.oib.com, one for cancellations@hername.oib.com, and another for anything else she wants organized.

Another cool thing about creating addresses on the fly is that you can easily block them if someone is spamming you.  All you have to do is hit the block button in your OtherInbox.

There are countless ways you can use OtherInbox to control email.  We love to share unique stories from our users. If you have a story you would like to share, please send it to myoib@LChaney.oib.com.

One last thing, if you ever want a good chuckle, you can watch someone’s expression when you give your email address as theirname@yourname.oib.com.  It always raises an eyebrow or two!

EDIT: We hope you had a good laugh. We had fun making this clip. We're also sorry if anyone is disappointed that OtherVoicemail isn't real. It sure would've been nice to have! April Fools!

Here at OtherInbox, as the cure for email overload, we are always looking for new and innovative ways to help you deal with all of those OTHER messages in your inbox, the newsletters, receipts, Facebook and Twitter notifications, etc.

So we figured, who else but us to figure out ways to cure the other annoyances in your life?

We kicked around a few ideas, but just couldn't get them perfect.

We tried to figure out a way to create an OtherBody to send to those long, boring meetings... but, the prototype kept exploding.

We even thought it would be nice to have an OtherFace that you could wear like a second skin. Playing poker and can't help smiling when you have a wining hand? No one will be able to read your OtherFace! A friend get a terrible haircut and asks how it looks but you can't help but laugh? Your OtherFace will show them how great is looks!
... but then someone in the office actually got a terrible haircut and in the end, we had to let a few people go.

Ultimately, we stuck to something a little closer to what we knew...

Today, we would like to announce a brand new product: OtherVoicemail with full integration with Google Voice!

Just use your Google Voice phone number like normal. When someone calls your Google Voice phone number, we automatically detect if it's a telemarketer. Our database of annoying callers is growing every day!

We then route them to a very special voicemail inbox - a different one for every telemarketer! Log in to your OtherVoicemail and click the giant CALLBACK button, and we will call them back. Keep clicking CALLBACK and fill up their voicemail!

Or, if you don't even want the voicemail in the first, you can have OtherVoicemail step in and handle your call for you. Our specially trained operators will, in a perfect imitation of your voice, talk to the telemarketer on your behalf. No more awkward hangups!

Hurry and sign up now! Go to OtherVoicemail.com to learn more.