During our beta testing period, one of our most requested features was a way to get OIB on the iPhone. As a first step, we created a Mobile Safari optimized website that allows all OIB users to read their messages on their iPhone or iPod Touch. Then, we released an IMAP server for premium users that allows you to add OIB as an additional email account on your iPhone, your Blackberry, or even your desktop computer. We're still thinking about the right way to do a native iPhone app.

Although we've had some bumps and bruises along the way, we recently fixed many of the problems our users reported on our support site and are confident the iPhone web app is working properly. We would love it if you would give it a try and let us know what you think!

Just point mobile Safari to my.otherinbox.com, log in with your OIB credentials, and you're all set. If a message is too large to view, tap the "Open message in new window" link above the message to view it full screen, complete with pinch-zooming and everything!

 

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)

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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]peeps.oib.com…oh look, I used it again ;).

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@peeps.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!

Thank you to "Jimmy Gardner":http://eastcoastblogging.com/ for putting together this screencast of OtherInbox including our new Gmail integration.

This post was guest-written by OtherInbox beta user "Beamer W":http://twitter.com/beamercola. Most emails that come through my OtherInbox account are one-way emails, which means you cannot reply to them. They are meant for notification purposes only. An example is a quick note to let me know I have a message waiting, eBay favorite searches, or Twitter following notifications, etc. So why are those coming via email? Because that's what everybody is used to. Unfortunately, email is highly overused, which contributes to "email overload." There are plenty of other technologies that would work well at delivering these to you, but since everybody has an email account, that's what we're stuck with. This is how OtherInbox met my zen needs. If you use Apple Mail, you probably know that you can receive RSS feeds. Luckily, OtherInbox feeds out RSS. By simply copying the "All messages in your inbox" feed from your "Notifications pane in Settings":http://beta.otherinbox.com/notification, you can easily add it to Apple Mail by clicking the + (plus) button in the bottom left corner. !/entry_images/Beamerblogpic5.png! !/entry_images/Beamerblogpic2.png! From there, you have a very important option: "Show in Inbox." This allows your feed to respond just like a mailbox would. The badge icon in your Dock increments just like it usually does. Just be sure to turn off "threading", as it's a little different for RSS feeds. !/entry_images/Beamerblogpic3.png! A great thing about this is if your messages are starting to overflow and you want to trim it down to just your personal emails, simply click the little down arrow next to your feed, and it moves it out of your inbox and into the RSS section, and doesn't increment your badge icon. This is excellent when you need to focus. !/entry_images/Beamerblogpic1.png! !/entry_images/Beamerblogpic4.png! I'm sure other email clients have the same capability, but I'm focusing on Apple Mail, because it's what I use.

After signing up, your OtherInbox is ready to receive messages right away. However, you may be looking at an empty OtherInbox and wondering what to do next. This guide will show you how OtherInbox works. If you already know how to use OtherInbox, by all means, go right ahead! If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to "email us(Email OtherInbox support)":mailto:help@otherinbox.com or visit our "support site(OtherInbox support)":http://help.otherinbox.com where you can search previous topics, post your own questions, and vote for new features. Please also take a look at our "frequently asked questions(FAQ)":http://go.otherinbox.com/faq for additional getting started tips. Trying out our features does no good without any messages, so let's start by creating a few to work with. h4. Send messages to your OtherInbox from your main email account You can create unlimited OtherInbox email addresses, but we're going to start by sending to a few:

delete@*YOURNAME*.otherinbox.com
save@*YOURNAME*.otherinbox.com
lock@*YOURNAME*.otherinbox.com

!/entry_images/gs_addresses.jpg(Sending mail to your OtherInbox account)! h4. Automatic mailbox creation In a few moments, check your OtherInbox and you should see three new mailboxes. They will be found in the second column, or the mailbox list. They will be called Delete, Save, and Block. This matches the first part of the OtherInbox email addresses you just created on the fly. No need to set them up! *Note:* To refresh your OtherInbox, click the OtherInbox logo at the top left-hand corner. !/entry_images/gs_mailboxes.jpg(OtherInbox mailboxes)! h4. Deleting messages Click on the Delete mailbox in the mailbox list. The message list will show the subject line, date, and sender for each message. The selected message can be viewed in the message reading area below. Above the reading area, click the Delete button. !/entry_images/gs_delete_msg.jpg(Deleting a message from your account)! Where did it go? To find it, let's look at the first column. This is the folder list. Right now, you are in the Inbox folder. Click on the Deleted folder and you will find the Delete mailbox with the message you just deleted. Want it back in your Inbox folder? Click the Move to Inbox button above the message. !/entry_images/gs_mailboxes_deleted.jpg(OtherInbox deleted messages mailbox)! h4. Saving messages for later Maybe you have a message you want to save for later? Click on the Save mailbox. Select the message you want to save, then click the Save button above it. Where is it now? In the Saved folder. You can always move it back to the Inbox if you want. !/entry_images/gs_save_msg.jpg(Save a message)! h4. Permanently blocking addresses One of the powerful features of OtherInbox is the ability to block all! Let's say you give one of your OtherInbox email addresses to a newsletter, and they sell your email address. Because you have unlimited OtherInbox email addresses, you can just block it and never get any messages from anyone again! Let's block the entire Block mailbox. Select the Block mailbox and click the Block All button above the message list. You have now blocked this mailbox completely! !/entry_images/gs_block_msg.jpg(Block all messages from an address)! Try sending a new message to block@*YOURNAME*.otherinbox.com. They will never show up in your Inbox again. No need to unsubscribe, hoping that it works. Just Block All! If you've changed your mind, or accidentally blocked something by mistake, the blocked messages can always be found in the Blocked folder. Or, if necessary, you can also "unblock the mailbox":http://gsfn.us/t/lwn as well. Think of a service that sends you messages you don't need right away, such as notifications from Facebook or Twitter. Do you have a newsletter you receive daily but don't need to read every day? Do you get weekly coupons from stores you only shop at every few months? Start by changing your email addresses with these social networks, online stores, newsletters, or anyone who sends you automated messages that clutter your main email account. Don't let these messages get lost or fill your primary inbox, making it impossible to find real messages from family, friends, and coworkers. Send those other messages to your OtherInbox and *cure email overload forever!*

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.

Tony at "AllAboutTheBetas.tv":http://allaboutthebetas.tv/?p=84 did a great introductory video about OtherInbox. It's only two and a half minutes long -- take a look!

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! !>/entry_images/award.jpg(Award)! # Ivor Clarke # Cyan Banister # Amy Baer # Ryan Pitylak # "John Engler":http://inluminent.com/ # Bijoy Goswami # Evan Alter # Aaron Scruggs # Joleen Sanborn # Rand Wacker # Bobby Potter # Ben Humphry # Ross Miller # Bradley Dean # Jesse Brede # Chris Hyams # Brandon Phillips # Arthur Meyerovich # Erica Tello # Matt Buck Everyone on this list has given out more than 100 OtherInbox addresses! P.S. Bjorn, Mason and Neelan -- you are so close!

How many email accounts do you have? A work account? An account from your ISP? How many Gmail or Yahoo! Mail accounts do you have? If you have multiple, chances are that one of them is your "other inbox". It's the one that you use to buy things online, sign up for newsletters, and anytime you don't want the email to clutter up your work inbox. When you are on a website and it asks for your email address, you make a quick decision -- Do I want this email to come to my work email address, or should I send it to the other one I don't check as frequently? This practice is very common - David Daniels from Jupiter Research (now Forrester Research) recently found that 75% of email users have at least 2 email addresses. Some people I know have a handful of email addresses. I won't even tell you how many I have! You don't these messages coming to your work inbox for a number of reasons: * These messages are less important so you don't need to see them right away * You think its likely that you will get spam from this website * These messages are inappropriate for your work email address * You need to provide an email address in order to get to the page you want to see * You know you only want to see the first email they send you, and none after that * You don't really want these messages at all If you're really sophisticated, you might have one email address provided by your work, another that you use for personal communications, and a third that is your "other inbox". Maybe you check them all separately, or maybe you configure Outlook or other email program to check all of the accounts in one place. Another way to look at it is that your work inbox is for emails that get sent by real people and your other inbox is for emails that get sent automatically by computers. The emails from people are the ones that you want to see right away and respond to. The emails from computers are the ones that can usually wait until you are ready to look at them. This is great because many people spend most of their day with their email open. Rather than getting distracted by the less important "other" stuff, you only get notified about new messages from real people that actually may require a response. Then once or twice a day, or once or twice a week, you can check your "other inbox" and clear it out much more quickly than if you have to scan closely for important emails mixed in with the other stuff. Before I separated things out, I would have more than a hundred messages in my inbox when I woke up every morning. Most people were sleeping at the same time as me, so almost of all them were automated messages sent by computers. Only a handful were sent by real people. Now that I have everything separated out, I only have a few messages waiting for me in the morning instead of more than a hundred. The rest are waiting in my "other inbox" for me to review at my leisure. "Get your OtherInbox":http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup and get all that junk out of your work email account.