I just came across an email service called OtherInbox. From what I’ve read, it serves as a dumping ground for all of your necessary spam email. For instance, if you need to sign up for a service, but don’t feel comfortable giving your personal email address, you can give it an email address to OtherInbox, thus saving your personal email for family and friends.
There are many other “throw-away” email services available. Just search Google for disposable email. These let you set up a temporary email account to be used for those one-time sign-ups. You sign in to get the activation email, then you never need to use it again.
What’s different about OtherInbox is that it’s a little more permanent than the disposable services. Instead of creating one junk account, you create a personal subdomain. For example, instead of creating a “junkemail@gmail.com” to collect all of your necessary spam, you would have a personal domain at OtherInbox in which you could create separate accounts for different services. For example, you could have amazon@username.otherinbox.com for all your order confirmations from Amazon. Or twitter@username.otherinbox.com for all of your Twitter notifications. By using these addresses, the email can be sorted and organized into corresponding folders.
This is a very unique way to handle all of this email that we may not want cluttering up our “real” email accounts, but which we can”t completely ignore.
I would like to mention, however, that GMail has a feature that can be used similar to this. With GMail, you can literally add words and letters to the front of your email address. For example, sample+add@gmail.com would be considered by GMail to be the same as sample@gmail.com. In other words, the GMail system ignores the plus sign and anything after it until the @ symbol. Thus, when giving an address for your Amazon account, you could give myemail+amazon@gmail.com. Then in your GMail account, you could create a folder and setup a filter to automatically drop your “+amazon” emails into that folder. This works a little more efficiently than trying to filter emails by sender’s address or by subject, since they may not always be the same.
OtherInbox is in beta, according to their website, so I put my name in. Hopefully I’ll get an invite soon so I can get my hands dirty and see how well it’ll work in practice, rather than just in theory.
I love tech, but don’t have as much time or money to spend on it as I’d like. I get what I need to sustain my Geek vicariously through other sources and pass it along to you.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I remembered seeing something about that last bit, the Gmail +category example a while ago but never implemented. I think now’s the time, as I get far too much email from facebook and my various Freecycle networks. Thanks for the useful tip!
@Brett – I believe OtherInbox is still in beta, and requires an invitation. I have some invites left, so if you’d like one, let me know your email address and I can pass one along.
@Christopher – would you have any left by any chance? :D
@Magic – It looks like they’ve taken out the abililty to invite people. Sorry. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow them @otherinbox; sometimes they invite people from there.