!/entry_images/small_pebble.jpg(Pile of rocks)!
Merlin Mann has a "great explanation":http://www.43folders.com/2007/05/30/email-bankruptcy-2 of why email can be so overwhelming.
bq. Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn't take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that's taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can't handle that one tiny thing. "What 'pile'? It's just a <deleted> pebble!"
??-- "Merlin Mann":http://www.43folders.com??
If you think that OtherInbox is innovative, the best startup, has the best design or more, "nominate us":http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/nominations/ for a Crunchie award!
!/entry_images/awards_2008_crunchies.jpg(Nominate OtherInbox for a Crunchie award)!:http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/nominations/
!/entry_images/josh_and_mikaela.jpg(Josh and Mikaela with Austin in the background)!
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!
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":http://www.lashback.com.
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":http://www.unsubcentral.com. 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":http://www.skylist.com, "UnsubCentral":http://www.unsubcentral.com, "Datran Media":http://www.datranmedia.com, 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.
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.
!/entry_images/feature_mailbox_notes.jpg(Mailbox notes)!
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.
!/entry_images/feature_mailbox_notes_tooltip.jpg(A visible mailbox note)!
Special thanks goes out to our users on Get Satisfaction who "suggested this idea and voted for it":http://gsfn.us/t/mou. We really appreciate all of the feedback and we are listening carefully!
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