The Other Inbox

When I saw this, my initial reaction, was “What’s the point?”. Then I thought haven’t I got enough mail accounts already? Why don’t I use one of my existing accounts, such as that yahoo or hotmail one that is around somewhere and fills up with spam anyway?

Still being curious, I thought I’d give it a look. It’s in beta right now, but I was lucky enough to get a code.

I went ahead and set myself up an account.  You choose a username, and then you get a base account URL of username.theotherbox.com.  You have an unlimited amount of email addresses. A good idea is to set up an email address for every site or mailing list you get email from.

How will you remember all those?

You don’t have to! Once you’ve set up your addresses, you simply log into your account, and each time you get an email from one of your addresses, it goes into a separate folder automatically.

OK, you still don’t see why you need that? You can do that with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail etc, using rules or filters.

Yes you can, but what this does is totally seperate your newsletters and prices lists, and the advertisments that you DO want from your important mail.

You see, you might like to get the special offers from Amazon, eBay or Tiger Direct. You enjoy the recipes, which you might get around to actually making one day. You like the weight-loss tips. You do want to read the latest Reuters or Time headlines.

First though, you really need to work through your important business emails, and also the personal ones – you need to know how your big sister is coping after her operation, before you check the discount prices at Circuit City.

By using TheOtherInBox you can split the wheat from the chaff. Only get in your main mailbox the stuff you really need. Put everything else in TheOtherInBox. Remember it’s separating into folders, so later, when you’ve read about your sister, and done the work project, and got a nice clean empty inbox, you can go and check TheOtherInBox and look at the cookie recipe, the online jokes, and how many points you’ve got on your Clubcard.

You don’t need to do it all at once. I’ve moved eBay, Amazon, Facebook, and MySpace over there already. I don’t really need to know when someone has thrown a sheep at me, or that Amazon has a cool printer deal now, because I bought one two months ago.

What I also found was that over a period of time, I’d signed up for an amazing amount of crap that when I took a moment to think about, I didn’t even read – it simply got deleted each time I got it. That meant I took a minute or so to unsubscribe to the stuff that looked useful or interesting at the time, but turned out to be irrelevant after all.

Remember TheOtherInBox is not for spam. It’s for the mail you do want, but just not right this minute.