OtherInbox: One mailbox to rule your junk mail

Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

OtherInbox: One mailbox to rule your junk mail

by Brad Linder Sep 10th 2008 at 3:00PM

If you've ever bought anything online you know that there's no such thing as a simple, one-time transaction. Once you give an online retailer your email address there's a good chance you'll continue to get emails letting you know about other items the company would like you to buy, coupons, or sales until the day you die (or opt out of these email messages, whichever comes first). And that's if you're lucky. There's also a chance that your email address will be sold to marketers and you'll start getting messages from dozens of companies you've never done business with at all.

There are a bunch of services that provide you with disposable email addresses that disappear after a few hours or days. You can use these services to create a temporary email address to sign up for a new web service or purchase an item online. But you need to sign up over and over again every time you need an email address. OtherInbox simplifies the process by letting you register for a single account which comes with a virtually unlimited number of email addresses.

Here's how it works. You register for a free account and you're assigned a custom domain like username.otherinbox.com. Any time an email is sent to any address ending with @username.otherinbox.com it will show up in your inbox. Messages will automatically be sorted into folders based on the address they're sent to.

So if you buy something from Amazon, you could use amazon@username.otherinbox.com. If you want to register for an online message board you could use BBS@username.otherinbox.com. And so on. You don't have to set anything up at OtherInbox first. Just give out any email address you feel like. Messages will always make it through, but since they'll be sorted by email address you can ignore the messages you don't need to pay attention to.

The service will also make it easier to figure out which companies are selling your contact info. If you start getting Viagra coupons at companyX@username.otherinbox.com and you've only given that address to company X, then it's a safe bet that the company is selling you out.

OtherInbox launched in private beta this week at TechCrunch50, but we've got some invites to give away on a first come, first served basis. Just be one of the first 24 people to sign up using this link and you should be good to go.

Tags: email, junk-mail, otherinbox, spam, techcrunch50

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Champ said 4:58PM on 9-10-2008

I think I got one, but 500 Internal Server Errors galore! Hope they fix this.

N. Godbout said 4:58PM on 9-10-2008

Oh, and thanks!

Peter said 4:58PM on 9-10-2008

Got mine. Thanks!

ferrazuriz said 5:10PM on 9-10-2008

Great idea... just a few weeks ago I was looking for something like this, but I found nothing usefull, so i ended creating another gmail.

This is much better.

David Trammell said 5:10PM on 9-10-2008

Error: We're sorry, OtherInbox only supports FireFox 3 and Safari 3.

Are you kidding me?? They need to change their URL to http://alpha.otherinbox.com.

yhancik said 5:10PM on 9-10-2008

Yay, thank you DLS !

downloadSquadReader said 5:18PM on 9-10-2008

Code didn't work for me, but I googled and found another invite code, TC50 .

Darren said 6:55PM on 9-10-2008

I just signed up for an addition gmail address and use that for anything I buy. After I get the confirmation, I just leave the junk going to that address and once every couple of months or when I need to use the address I delete everything in there and go on my way. No need to have another special account. You can use with any web based email system

Sean said 8:48PM on 9-10-2008

I got the "Error: We're sorry, OtherInbox only supports FireFox 3 and Safari 3" message when I visited the site using Firefox 3... They are not exactly inspiring massive confidence with this...

Sean said 9:04PM on 9-10-2008

I got the "Error: We're sorry, OtherInbox only supports FireFox 3 and Safari 3" message when I visited the site using Firefox 3... They are not exactly inspiring massive confidence with this...

J said 10:56PM on 9-10-2008

I've allways used Gishpuppy (http://www.gishpuppy.com/) but this is interesting. I like the sound of the self organising folders, and running a completely seperate inbox could be better than the filters I have for gishpuppy.com in gmail atm.

If anyone has a spare invite I'd appreciate one please, I have some Dropbox ones I can swap (Dropbox is the best thing since sliced bread, I've my USB i gathering dust :))

smx said 2:41AM on 9-11-2008

oh plz me need invite

zkam said 8:15AM on 9-11-2008

Hmmm... This is an exciting new idea at TechCrunch50?

Folks, check out Spamgourmet.com

I've been using it for over 4 years now. It's a similar idea (but arguably better). Instead of having another inbox to check, Spamgourmet forwards all email to a real email address or your choosing (which you can change at any time). Like this one, you can generate a new "fake" address on the fly, and you can control how many messages you actually receive. Instead of the format in the above example (amazon@username.otherinbox.com), you use the format amazon.x.username@spamgourmet.com, where x is a number from 1-20 (or another word, in which case the first character corresponds to a number). The number tells Spamgourmet how many messages to allow to get forwarded to you. You can got to your spamgourmet account and replenish this, or define "trusted senders" who are allowed to send unlimited amounts of email to this address. If you find that the address is being used for spam, you can disable it. (When you do this, the sender doesn't even know - the subsequent emails are just deleted).

Also, because some sites reject the spamgourmet.com domain for addresses, they have several alternative domains that you can use. And like OtherInBox, you can organize your mail as you wish, an you can tell if a company has sold your address.

It's a free service, it works great, and you don't need any beta invites. Like I said, I've been using it for years. The only problem you MAY encounter is a slight delay in the forwarding of the email to you (and this is rare - usually it's almost immediate).

Jeff M said 8:15AM on 9-11-2008

That is a really cool idea and I could really use that, but unfortunately the only way I could find to create an account was by manually finding the signup page @ http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup and then I still need an activation code.

Is there anyway to signup without a code or could you send one my way?

Thanks,
Jeff

tymes said 8:15AM on 9-11-2008

This is the same idea as gmail where you email+wildcard@gmail.com = email@gmail.com.

My own mail service has been doing this since the 90s

Philip said 8:15AM on 9-11-2008

True, and the label filtering can do the same as the automatic folders

FakeEmail said 8:15AM on 9-11-2008

Or you can just use 10minutemail and skip the registering process

http://10minutemail.com

G.K. said 1:16PM on 9-11-2008

I usually use Mailinator.com for all my disposable email needs.

m said 8:10AM on 9-12-2008

compared to spam gourmet, this is nothing.

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