My mother has been teaching first or second grade for more years than she will allow me to admit in this post. Recently, she logged into her email account with the school district while visiting with some fellow teachers in the teacher's lounge. The first email that popped up informed her how she could enlarge her . . . well, let's just say it was not pencil. My mom turned red and immediately logged out of her email. The teachers started talking about how embarrassing all the spam is, how they don't know where it comes from, and what to do about it.
My mom is a great teacher, but she doesn't teach technology. She has a hard time checking her voicemail on her brick of a cell phone, let alone being the first to sign up for a cool new beta app for email overload. But, when she called me and told me her story, I knew I had to do something. I talked my mom through signing up for an OtherInbox and even trying out our new "OtherInbox for Gmail" that we are testing with a few of our current beta users. To my surprise, she went through all the steps with ease and little guidance. When I woke up this morning, I had an email from my aunt, a cousin, and some of my mothers teacher friends asking for OtherInbox.
OtherInbox has attracted some of the most tech savvy people I have ever met, but it can be beneficial to anyone. If you know someone who could use a little help with clearing out embarrassing spam and unwanted junk in their email, get them on our waiting list, and help them gain control of their email again. Oh, and before you ask, my aunt and my mother's teacher friends are all on the waiting list as well. ;)
During this economy downturn, all of us have been affected in one way or another. Stores are closing, unemployment rates are soaring, and the stock market is dropping fast. Through these rough times, we would like to provide you with some helpful tips for using your OtherInbox.
h4. Job Search
Looking for a job? There are several ways your OtherInbox can help your job search.
Since knowledge is essential in getting ahead within an industry, you can become an industry expert by signing up for blogs, newsletters, and news reports. Send them all to your OtherInbox.
More importantly, you can also sign up for the blogs of the companies you are seeking employment with. If an opportunity for an interview arises, gaining insight about the industry and company is crucial. The organized mailboxes OtherInbox provides allow you to find that information quickly.
You can also use your OtherInbox to sign up at job sites such as craigslist, Monster, LinkedIn, and every other possible job site out there. Not only does this give you organized mailboxes to read through and pick the right job, but it also clears your real inbox. Never miss out on someone trying to reach you for an interview!
h4. Starting Your Own Business
Ready to start your own company? Looking to make some extra cash with a current hobby? OtherInbox will be your personal assistant.
For example, if you are selling paintings online, you usually post your email address as a point of contact. However, who wants to expose their personal email address to strangers? This is where OtherInbox steps in.
Post your OtherInbox email address instead: _Buy my painting[at]yourname.oib.com._ Use OtherInbox to sell a car, advertise on craigslist, or for any other situation you can think of!
h4. Shopping Online
When every dollar counts, don't you want to get the best deals out there? With OtherInbox, you can sign up for all of your favorite online stores.
You can receive exclusive coupons, notifications of special sales events, and more, right to an organized mailbox. Those emails are a nightmare when they are piling up in your real inbox. With OtherInbox, read them only when you need them.
If you are looking to buy a coffee maker or a new home, OtherInbox can help you save and compare to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck. You can also sign up for online consumer reviews right to your OtherInbox, so you can make sure you are getting quality product at a great deal.
OtherInbox cares about our community of users and hopes that you will find ways to use your OtherInbox to make life a little easier. If you have an idea or would like to share an interesting way in which you use your OIB, please comment below.
Well, maybe not for everything, but it sure is making a difference in the lives of thousands of our users. OtherInbox uses social media to not only educate people on the benefits of getting control of their email again, but also to listen to what people have done with OtherInbox on their own. We have an active Twitter community that you can follow "@otherinbox ":http://twitter.com/otherinbox. We also use "Facebook":http://www.facebook.com/pages/OtherInbox/10044456730 to connect to users, communicate tips and new features, and gather suggestions and ideas. Some OtherInbox beta testers have found ways to market their talents, organize their small business email, search for wedding gowns, and even assist in developing websites like in this comment from "@hadees":http://twitter.com/hadees/status/1116790674 "@otherinbox I use it when I'm developing websites so I can sign up lots of test users each with their own unique email address."
Even the community on our "support site":http://help.otherinbox.com is encouraged and active in giving advice on new uses or product enhancements. We develop our product roadmap based on user feedback as much as possible. OtherInbox is a startup with two employees who serve as full time community specialists. We work with our community on a daily basis to find what they find useful in our product and how they are using OIB. We will even be posting t-shirt ideas that were provided by our users for our SXSW launch in March. Some companies pretend to listen to what their communities say. Others, like OtherInbox, rely on the input of the community to make the best product possible.
Although OtherInbox is currently freezing beta invites while we make some improvements, we have had many people reach out and ask for a beta invite. We are working to complete these improvements as quickly as possible to ensure that everyone is cured of email overload. We might not have the answers to solving the economic crisis (although Washington should consider opening an OtherInbox for suggestions), but according to our users, we have found the answer to fighting spam and gaining control of your inbox again.
We give a special thanks to our active community for your constant feedback and support. Ideas, comments, questions, tips, and concerns are always encouraged!
Thanks!
We're getting started on our feedback loop and whitelist program for senders. If you'd like to be an early beta tester, please sign up below!
!/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??
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.
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!
!/entry_images/interview_mike_at_fiveruns.jpg(Mike is interviewed on the FiveRuns blog)!:http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/9/19/rails-takefive-five-questions-with-mike-subelsky
Ruby on Rails fans should read "Mike Subelsky's interview on the Five Runs blog":http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/9/19/rails-takefive-five-questions-with-mike-subelsky. In the interview, Mike is talks about GitHub, agile development, JavaScript frameworks, Merb, and Amazon Web Services. Five Runs is a Ruby on Rails systems management company that is also based here in Austin.
We just want to say thank you to all our friends on Twitter and share some of our favorite Tweets! "Follow us on Twitter":http://twitter.com/otherinbox to get an exclusive beta invitation!
bq. everyone should be using otherinbox.com i'm a beta tester now, its amazing
??--kurtm85??
bq. @otherinbox Thanks so much. It looks awesome and I will be using the heck out of it. Converting all my Bacn over to it.
??--merlik??
bq. Great service from @otherinbox who noticed my gripe on Twitter and responded within 30 mins.
??--philmorle??
bq. OtherInbox, you're proving to be truly awesome, but please, for me, make a viable mobile version. Please?
??--geekgrrl??
bq. @otherinbox it's a very useful service. I've been moving my newsletters and other non-important mail over there as it comes in.
??--Eyebee??
bq. Yessss! Got an invite to @otherinbox. Great idea, guys!
??--rickfu??
bq. @otherinbox how did I live so long without you?
??--kurtm85??
bq. Other Inbox, in the tech crunch 50, has to be the best concept since sliced bread. http://www.otherinbox.com
??--do_re_mi??
bq. okay, just got my first "real" notice from @otherinbox about junk I'd received. Totally bad ass.
??--benkimball??
bq. Wow OtherInbox is such a brilliant idea!
??--JayC_??
bq. I have been testing http://otherinbox.com for the last two days now and find it really useful. They are also on twitter @otherinbox
??--FabianPattberg??
bq. @otherinbox Your interface design is so simple and clean. I can't wait to get my hands on it! - http://bit.ly/3iSYQA
??--chadpaulson??
bq. otherinbox.com is pretty cool. now i can use it to sign up for also these beta sites
??--jcataldo??
bq. Checking out @otherinbox. I think I'll be using this service often.
??--twofivethreetwo??
bq. @bindela you are right otherinbox.com sounds interesting. I'd love to have my email arrive sorted.
??--hravan??
bq. @otherinbox you guys rock! Totally awesome service, I hope you guys get the prize money @ TC50!
??--digitalknk??
bq. holy cow @otherinbox support is fast.
??--benkimball??
bq. I just used my @otherinbox for the first time, making a campaign donation. I desperately want OtherCellPhone. @joshuabaer pls build kthx.
??--benkimball??
bq. Just signed up for OtherInbox; no more sending all e-mail to my filter gmail account! Yes!
??--snafilter??
Spam can be pretty confusing. I doubt that very many people actually ask to receive Viagra advertisements by email, yet they just start to appear. Did they make up my email address? Or did they get it from another website that I gave it to?
There are basically five reasons why we get spam.
# We give our email address to a website, and they send us email we didn't expect
# We give our email address to a website, and they sell it to other websites
# We give our email address to a website, and they get hacked
# Someone's computer gets a virus, and we get spam because we are in their address book
# We post our email address on a website somewhere, and spammers "harvest" it off the web
It's always one of these reasons. If you create a new email address and don't ever use it to sign up for anything or post it anywhere, you won't receive any spam. We get spam as a result of using the email address to buy things, sign up for newsletters, and email other people. For every spam email message we receive, there was an action we took that caused it.
The first three are probably the most common. The last two happen less frequently but when they do, your email address is pretty much hosed. When you only have one email address, it's a Pandora's Box. Once the box is open and your email address gets into the hands of spammers, you can't take it back. Lets look at each case in more detail:
h4. We give our email address to a website, and they send us email we didn't expect
Probably the most common reason for getting spam is that we just don't realize what it is we're signing up for. Every website has a Privacy Policy and there is usually a page or more of "fine print" that nobody ever reads. For example, most people would never think that signing up for Wired Magazine would cause them to receive emails about other magazines such as Glamour and Style. It's not that Wired readers are likely to be interested in Glamour -- its just that Glamour and Wired are both run by the same company - Conde Naste.
Like many other conglomerates, Conde Naste cross-markets one magazine to the readers of the other magazines. Legally this is perfectly fine and their privacy policy explicitly gives them the right to do this. But its not what we expect. When the email message arrives promoting Glamour Magazine, we don't realize that the reason why we received the Glamour email message is because we signed up for Wired. Even if we unsubscribe from Wired, we might continue to receive email messages about other magazines. In order to stop these emails, we need to unsubscribe from Conde Naste as a whole. But that's very unlikely because we don't really know who Conde Naste is to begin with. So we have to unsubscribe from each brand individually and wonder why we keep receiving email messages about different magazines that we have never signed up for. It's pretty confusing!
h4. We give our email address to a website, and they sell it to other websites
Most people would be amazed at how much our personal information is bought and sold without our knowledge. Credit card companies make a lot of money from interest payments and fees, but they make more money from tracking our purchase behavior and selling this information to other companies. Sometimes this is called "Lead Generation" and other times it is called "Data Append". Whatever you call it, there are mature and sophisticated industries built around the buying and selling of personal information.
Some companies have whole business models built on this concept. An example of a company with pretty good practices is LendingTree.com. We sign up at LendingTree.com if we're interested in refinancing our home. Their pitch is that by telling them all about the loan you need, they will find the best rate for you among multiple lenders. They way they accomplish this is by selling your information to lenders as a "lead". Lending Tree doesn't show you loans that would save you money unless the lender is willing to pay them for the lead. This is a "good" example because its pretty clear what's going on. We know that when we sign up at LendingTree.com, we're going to receive emails about loan offers. The only problem comes after we decide on a lender - all of the other lenders still have our email address and there is a good chance we'll be receiving email messages with loan offers for years to come.
The bad examples are when this happens without us knowing it. The most notorious example of this is called "co-registration" and is also an industry of its own. Depending on how good your spam filter is, you may have seen email messages with subject lines such as "Win a free iPod", "Do you like Coke or Pepsi?", or "Party with a star!". These promotions are designed to draw us into a website where we are presented with a series of offers to refinance our house, get a new credit card, get an online educational degree or to get free DVD's from Columbia House. In order to win our free iPod, we have to register for a certain number of the other promotional offers. For every promotional offer that we fill out, the website gets paid a bounty. They pay for your free iPod out of the bounties they collect. Most people that sign up want the free iPod, but aren't interested in the promotional offers.
There are a zillion other variations of this model that fall somewhere between the "pretty good" practices of LendingTree.com and the "bad" practices of the site offering you a free iPod.
h4. We give our email address to a website, and they get hacked
We don't hear about this much, but it happens much more than most people realize. You register at a website and then that website gets hacked and their customer list is stolen by spammers. Or maybe an employee gets fired and steals a copy of the customer list on his way out.
*This happens a lot.* We just never hear about it. Why? First of all most of the time no actually knows about it. Without OtherInbox, they have no way of knowing what caused the spam or which list is being abused. Most companies wouldn't know if their own customer list was stolen.
Second, when it does happen, they don't want to tell us about it! They don't want anyone to know that they were the cause of the security breach and they try to just "make it go away".
h4. Someone's computer gets a virus, and we get spam because we are in their address book
In this example, someone accidentally downloads a virus or other malware that infects their personal computer. It looks through their email address book for valid email addresses to spam.
h4. We post our email address on a website somewhere, and spammers "harvest" it off the web
As much as we try to avoid it, there are certain times where we have to post our email address publicly on a web page. For example, some message boards and email lists will cause our email address to be displayed publicly in the archives. Another example is the email address listed in the Whois DNS record when we register a domain name. Posting an email address on a web page is a guaranteed way to attract spam. Harvesting email addresses of web pages is illegal, but it is still a common practice.
h4. What else?
Can you think of other causes of spam that I'm missing?
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.
To risk carrying the analogy too far, we can think about email as falling into three major categories of pork.
We're all pretty familiar with spam email. It's the stuff that we don't want.
!/entry_images/mail_spam.jpg(Spam)!
Spam usually works hard to try and look like ham, the stuff we really do want.
!/entry_images/mail_ham.jpg(Ham)!
And then then is "bacn":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn (electronic), the stuff that we think we want, but not right now.
!/entry_images/mail_bacn.jpg(Bacn)!
I've got email overload. I try to do the "Inbox Zero":http://www.43folders.com/izero thing but I just can't make it happen. A few times a year I can knock it down to zero and then within a month I'm back at a few thousand messages in my inbox.
!/entry_images/mail_overload.jpg(Mail overload)!
Part of the problem is that I just keep signing up for more emails! I'm not talking about Spam, I'm talking about emails that I sign up, thinking that I want them at the time. But then when the emails arrive, I realize that either 1) I don't really have time read the messages even though I thought I wanted them or 2) there are more emails than I expected and they aren't relevant to me.
I buy a lot of things online. In fact, if I can buy it online, I probably do. I get better prices, can read reviews, and get it shipped to my door because I'm too busy to drive out and pick it up. It seems like every month I'm able to buy something online that I had to buy offline before. As a result, I get more confirmation emails, shipping notices, and all of the other newsletters and promotions that follow afterwards. MORE EMAIL.
I get most of my news online. I don't read the paper. I don't watch the news on TV. I get Google Alerts. I subscribe to RSS feeds. I sign up for email newsletters. I get breaking news from CNN and traffic alerts from my local TV station. I'm always finding new email lists I can sign up for to get news about specific topics or special alerts. MORE EMAIL.
One of the things I love about the Apple retail store is that when I walk into the store and make a purchase they always offer to email me the receipt instead of printing it out. I wish every store would do that! I don't want to carry around a paper receipt and then have to do something with it later. In the process, Apple collects email addresses to build their marketing lists. I think we'll see other companies doing this in the future. MORE EMAIL.
Cars even send email now! If you have the OnStar system installed in your car, it sends email alerts when the car needs service or if the air in the tires is low. It won't be long before your refrigerator sends you email when your milk is sour, your washing machine sends you email when it needs service, your shoes send you email when the sole is wearing thin, etc. MORE EMAIL.
It's just going to get worse! And notice that I'm not talking about spam or phishing emails. All the examples listed above are things that (you think) you want. We aren't good at deciding if we want something at the time when we sign up. We don't know if we really have time read it until after we get it. We think we want all this stuff, but we don't want to spend our whole day reading email.
We need a tool like OtherInbox to help cut through the clutter. It needs to start with the assumption that we're NOT going to read every single message. It needs to allow us to find the important messages without reviewing every message in chronological order. It needs to be smart about automatically recognizing emails I don't need to see and filing the away for me.
"Sign up for the beta":http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup and try it out!
We're just going to get more and more email, and we already get more email than we have the time to read. But its not all spam! We're getting more and more stuff that we want - but just don't have time to read. So the solution isn't just filtering stuff out. We either need to find ways to process more than one message at a time or else we need to find a way to have messages processed automatically so that we don't need to read each one.
The messages in an OtherInbox are organized into a different mailboxes for each website. There is not one master "Inbox" with all of the messages mixed together. This is an important fundamental difference between OtherInbox and other email readers -- it encourages you to work with groups of messages instead of reading them one at a time.
!/entry_images/screenshot_msg_organization.jpg(OtherInbox screenshot)!
Once you start thinking about commercial email this way, everything changes. You don't necessarily need to click on a mailbox to know what's in it.
For example, I know what kind of emails Best Buy sends me - receipts, shipping notices and promotions. If I recently bought something from Best Buy and I see new messages are waiting from Best Buy, then there is a good chance they are my receipt and shipping notice. If I haven't bought anything recently, then they are probably just promotions.
Register.com only sends me emails to warn me that a domain needs to be renewed. Those are important and time sensitive, so any time I see new messages waiting from Register.com I check them right away.
Because I generally know what's in each mailbox before I click on it, I don't click on certain mailboxes as often. They don't get in my way. My eyes pass right over them as I look for more important messages. It doesn't mean that I never click on them, but I get to do it at the best time for me. The less important messages don't clutter things up and prevent me from getting to the more important ones.
I usually check my OtherInbox once a day. I quickly scan through the mailbox list for anything important. For me, that might be an eBay auction that I'm bidding on or notifications from Twitter and Facebook. These are messages that aren't important enough to interrupt me at work, but that I want to read or respond to every day. Certain blogs that I read in OtherInbox fall into this category as well, while other blogs are lower priority.
Looking through the important things usually takes about 3 minutes. There is rarely more than 2 or 3 the important emails to look at. Then I usually stop and go back to work.
This happens so fast because I don't even look at the less important emails. I skip right over them. It doesn't matter if Best Buy sends me 3 promotions or 100 promotions - they don't get in my way and I don't really see them until I'm ready to review them or just delete them.
Every few days, I take about 15 minutes to clear out my OtherInbox. After dealing with the most important emails, I then go through the list from top to bottom, mailbox by mailbox. In each mailbox, I quickly scan the subject lines to see if there is anything interesting. If something catching my eye, I click on the message and take a look. When I'm done scanning the lists I click Mark All as Read to clear out the entire mailbox.
This part is really significant. One benefit of organizing the messages into mailboxes is being able to jump right to the messages that matter most without sifting through the less important ones. But another benefit is being able to process the messages as a group in a specific context.
One benefit is that I get to choose when to look at the less important emails. But another benefit is that its actually faster to read the messages in groups than one at a time. Kind of like starting a Tivo television show 15 minutes late so that I can skim through the commercials, by letting 5 or 10 messages pile up in a mailbox instead of handling them one at a time, I can read my email much faster. This means that with OtherInbox I get to choose when I read the emails AND I spend less time doing it.
As I scan through the messages in a particular mailbox, I have a context. I'm looking at my CNet Newsletters. I'm looking at my Best Buy promotions. I'm looking at comments posted to my blog. As you scan the message list, it is much faster because the messages are all similar.
See how much harder it is to scan this list of messages:
!/entry_images/gmail_msg_listing.jpg(Gmail message list)!
than this one:
!/entry_images/screenshot_mail_list.jpg(OtherInbox message list)!
When I'm done scanning the messages, I can click one button to act on all the messages at once. I don't need to select them individually or select all because they are already grouped. I can click a button to Mark All as Read, Delete All, or Block All of the messages. I find that I use the Mark All as Read and Delete All buttons more often that the buttons that act on individual messages.
As we get more and more email, we need to move past reading messages one at a time. This isn't about filtering out spam. This is about reading email more efficiently and spending less time sifting through junk to get to the important stuff.
"Sign up for OtherInbox":http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup and see how you can move past reading email one message at a time.
Gmail makes a pretty good "other inbox". Every Gmail account supports "plus addressing", which means you can create unique email addresses for your Gmail account by adding "+blah" to the end of your email address. For example, if my email address was _jbaer1975@gmail.com_, I could give Amazon _jbaer1975+amazon@gmail.com_ and give Facebook _jbaer1975+facebook@gmail.com_.
This helps with spam, because if you want to know why you are receiving an individual message you can "Show Details" to see the To address that the message was sent to. Then if you want to stop that sender, you can create a filter to delete them automatically. For now we'll just ignore the fact that many websites won't allow you to sign up with a "+" in your email address. In fact, even Google Alerts won't let you use a plus when you sign up!
!/entry_images/gmail_alerts.jpg(Google alerts)!
Unfortunately, you won't notice most of the interesting things you would see with OtherInbox because messages aren't automatically grouped by the address that they come to. And you still need to look at messages one at a time or do custom searches to group them.
Even if I give out different email addresses, I still end up with this unmanageable list:
!/entry_images/gmail_msg_listing.jpg(Gmail message list)!
Giving out different email addresses to every website is a great foundation for OtherInbox, but there is a lot more to it. OtherInbox displays messages in a unique way that allows you to jump right to the messages you want to read now and ignore the ones that you want to read later. You don't need to scan through them one-by-one. Without any effort, you instantly know if someone is spamming you and it can be blocked with a single click, rather than having to configure a filter or rule.
Once you give out a bunch of different email addresses with the plus in them, its still a pain in the butt anytime that you want to reply. If you just reply normally, you will expose your real email address. In order to reply and have it come From the correct email address, you need to go through a tedious process of verifying the email address by sending a message to yourself, clicking the link, and then selecting the proper address when you reply. With OtherInbox, this all happens automatically and it always replies from the correct address without you having to set anything up.
!/entry_images/gmail_verify_address.jpg(Verify email address in Gmail)!
So yes, you can use Gmail as your "other inbox". But chances are, you will still get email overload and that mailbox will still become a big pile of junk. You still need to look through your messages one at a time and don't have an intelligent way to batch the messages into actionable groups. You might create filters to stop some of the spam, but you probably won't notice many of the ways your email address gets shared, sold and abused. Anytime you want to reply, you need to go through the verification process and send yourself an email to set up the correct From address.
There is a lot more to OtherInbox than just giving out different email addresses. It's a great foundation, but it's just the start. "Give OtherInbox a try":http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup to see how it can cure your email overload!
Here are some of my favorite quotes that we've received from beta users over the past few months.
bq. I love this service! I've found myself willingly signing up for things that require an email address to receive more information – all while feeling safe about my personal email address. The organization of incoming emails makes it very easy to see if someone is abusing the email address. I look forward to seeing more features as you develop the service. Keep up the good work!
??--40 year old technology executive??
bq. Now I'm wishing that all my existing newsletters would switch to OtherInbox automagically!
??--35 year old technology executive??
bq. It is soo awesome I am working on changing all of my acccounts over to it. The good thing about you testing this on me is that I have absolutely no knowledge about computers. I know the basics and that's about it. Thank you for introducing me to this!
??--22 year old receptionist??
bq. Ok, been moving over a few of my newsletters over and LOVING the service. This truly changes the way one approaches having other people contact you.
??--35 year old technologist??
Let us know what you think by posting a comment!
!/entry_images/failtruck.jpg(The OtherInbox failtruck)!
Hopefully this is the only place you'll ever see the Fail Truck. But if you try to access OtherInbox and you do see the Fail Truck, that means that your account is temporarily unavailable. We work hard to make sure that your email is always safe, even if your account is temporarily unavailable. So don't fret, just come back in an hour or two and everything will probably be back to normal.
I haven't received an email from the Washington Post in at least a year, although I did give them my email address a long time ago. Then out of no where, I get an email for their DC Scout Weddings. Now, I have no idea why they thought I would be interested in weddings in Washington, DC. I am already married and I don't live in DC. But even if I was about to get married in DC, I still would have considered this spam because I did not expect to get messages like this as a result of creating an account to read the news on the WashingtonPost.com website.
!/entry_images/msg_dc_scout_weddings.jpg(Washington Post DC Scout Weddings message)!
I was wondering why they sent me this and so I took a closer look. Then I noticed that they have an invalid From address of simply, "washingtonpost.com" -- it is not a valid email address. So any replies to this message will bounce.
Finally, I scroll to the bottom and click on the unsubscribe link, which takes me to the following page which is not CAN-SPAM compliant under the "recent FTC CAN-SPAM regulations":http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/05/ftc-releases-ne.html because it requires a password in order to unsubscribe:
!/entry_images/msg_washington_post.jpg(Washington Post email registration form)!
It seems like there are really 2 different kinds of RSS feeds for me. With many feeds I want to see every post as soon as it comes out and consciously decide to read it or delete it. It's not surprising that so many people choose to read their RSS in email by using a service like Feedburner or RSSFwd to get each individual blog posting delivered as an email message.
For example, I like enjoy reading the blogs of "Marc Andreessen":http://blog.pmarca.com/rss.xml and "David Byrne":http://journal.davidbyrne.com/index.rdf. I try to read every post. So it makes sense to have the arrive in my email where they will sit in my Inbox (actually I automatically file them into a folder with "OtherInbox":http://www.otherinbox.com) until I read them or delete them.
Yet there are other types of feeds that are more like reading the newspaper. They are full of many different topics and I only want to read the ones that catch my eye or are the most popular. This is the kind of thing that people read in an RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines. This is how I read the blogs of all of my competitors products - I just want to scan the recent headlines I don't have time to look at every single one and if they pile up then I just want to see the most recent ones.
I wonder which is more popular? Do most people read RSS feeds and blogs from their web browser, from a specialized news reader, or by subscribing to a Feedburner email? In the past I've always used the email option if it was available. Which do you prefer?
!>/entry_images/plunger.jpg(Plunger)!
Everyone seems to agree that email is great. There are many types of communication that I prefer to receive via email over other channels such as postal mail, the telephone, fax, carrier pigeon, etc. I love how at the Apple retail stores they will email my receipt to me instead of printing it out (save a tree!). I get much less postal mail now that all of my financial institutions and utilities have "paperless billing" options that send monthly statements by email. Judging by the popularity of these services, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Yet everyone knows that email is broken. The problem is bigger than just spam. "Michael Arrington recently declared email bankruptcy":http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/a-crisis-in-communication/ and deleted his inbox. There are two fundamental problems, both of which are only getting worse:
# Our actions generate more incoming email than we have time to read
# We want to respond to more emails than we have time to
Spam is part of the first problem. But another part of the first problem is that its a lot easier to sign up for new emails than to decide which ones to unsubscribe from. Over time, you get more and more things that you've signed up for as well as more and more spam that you don't want. You start off with a clean slate and then just add more and more baggage over time until eventually the only solution is to get a new email address and start over.
The second problem stems from the fact that email lets you easily communicate with more people than you could before. It's very easy to write a single email, copy and paste it for 5 different recipients, and end up with 5 replies coming back at you. Email multiplies quickly. Yet we're still typing each reply one at a time.
Both of these problems are just getting worse. As we more offline things go online we will only get more newsletters, receipts, statements, warnings, notifications, etc. Soon my car will be sending me emails and my house and my dishwasher. There will be too much to go into a single "inbox".
And as more things go online we connect with more other people. The more people we connect with, the more we want to communicate, the more emails we send and the more replies that come back at us. RSS, Blogs, social networks and Twitter all help to alleviate this problem. Rather than blasting an email out to 100 people, you can just post it to your blog or on Twitter.
As the number of online communications grows, not all of it needs to happen in email and not all of it will be manageable within email. I don't really want to have receipts in my email -- that's just the most convenient option available to me. In the end, that receipt needs to end up in a filing cabinet, database or expense report. I want to be able to find the receipt later if I need it, but it doesn't really belong in my Inbox.
This doesn't mean email is dead or that email shouldn't evolve. Quite the opposite, email needs to get better and helping us find the messages we want and ignore the ones we don't. We need to be able to reliably unsubscribe from emails we don't want and trust that the ones we do want are legitimate.
We need to start thinking about a more sophisticated Inbox than just a list of messages sorted by date.
Webmail is insanely popular. Combining data from Jupiter Research and Comscore, I estimate that there will be about 35 million new webmail accounts created in the US in 2008.
"According to Chris Anderson":http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free_webmail, Google and Yahoo! each make about $90 per year per user of their webmail service. But I can't imagine that its all from banner advertising or AdWords. Where does all the money come from?
!/entry_images/article_webmail.jpg(Where is the money in webmail infographic)!:http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free_webmail
"Chart":http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free_webmail by Steven Leckart, Design by Nicholas Felton
Why is there so much webmail? People have lots of reasons for using it, but one of the most popular reasons is as "spam" email address that they don't check as frequently. It doesn't take too long for this account to be full of junk mail. To find a message they want, they have to sift through tons of stuff they don't want. Some people put up with it, and others get fed up and start over with a new webmail address. It's not surprising that 17 percent of the US online population creates a new e-mail address every 6 months according to Jupiter Research.
While this may be common, its not much of a solution for spam. It doesn't really solve anything, it just moves the junk from their primary email account into their webmail account.
Banana Republic and Old Navy are all owned by "The Gap":http://www.gap.com, and anyone who shops at more than one store quickly notices similarities in the website and email marketing. Their site is a pleasure to use and makes browsing easy. Their emails are relevant and come at a reasonable frequency.
I like getting their emails. In fact I think I buy something after clicking on an email from them more often than I do from just visiting their website on my own.
A while back, The Gap launched a new online shoe store called "Piperlime":http://www.piperlime.com. Like most companies in their situation, they wanted to help launch Piperlime by cross marketing it to customers of The Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy.
I received the following email from Banana Republic and a similar one from The Gap.
!/entry_images/msg_piperlime.jpg(Piperlime email message)!
Now of course they were CAN-SPAM compliant. There was nothing deceptive about the message, it included their physical address as well as a conspicuous unsubscribe link. They didn't send too many -- I only got one or two.
But they went beyond the best practices of most marketers and made sure that it was extremely clear WHY I was receiving it. The message comes FROM Banana Republic and the first thing you see at the top of the message is a big Banana Republic logo. Then you see the stuff about Piperlime. But no one would ever get confused as to why they were receiving this.
And interestingly enough, even though I don't care about Piperlime and could possibly consider it "spam", it didn't bother me because I knew what was going on and I knew I was in control. I could make the Piperlime emails stop by unsubscribing from Banana Republic. In this case, I didn't unsubscribe because I knew I wanted to keep getting the Banana Republic emails and decided I could put up with the occasional Piperlime email.
At the time that this happened, I wrote to Banana Republic customer service and told them that I did not want to hear from them about Piperlime at all. They told me at the time that unfortunately they were not able to comply with my request because of a technical limitation - I had to choose between getting all of the emails or stopping all of the emails. Within a few months, I noticed a new option in their unsubscribe text that DID allow me to unsubscribe from JUST the Piperlime emails.
So not only does The Gap send great email and have great practices, but they even listen to their customers! I wish more retailers followed their example!
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