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

OtherInbox: One mailbox to rule your junk mail

OtherInbox
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.