The Productivity Paradox

OtherInbox claims to be “the cure for email overload.” I think that is a bit of exaggerated marketing talk - I would say that it certainly is an effective treatment of e-mail overload, but not a cure just yet. (The cure is a more comprehensive approach to information overload - and this is what forms the basis of E-mail redux.) However, using OtherInbox can go a long way towards alleviating non-work / personal e-mail overload.

I will describe how I use it and then you can make up your own mind.

I’ve been part of the beta test for a few weeks now and I love it. It works in the following way: instead of giving you a single email address, OtherInbox gives you the ability to create multiple addresses in your own subdomain (myusername.otherinbox.com). These addresses can be used to sign up anywhere. In the screenshot below you can see a list of sites / services where I converted my original sign-up e-mail address to a custom OtherInbox address. You can do this with a seemingly-infinite number of sites.

As you can see on the screenshot below I use OtherInbox to keep track of everything from banking services, news websites I subscribe to like The Economist, events notifications like Eventful, to social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

So that’s great for legitimate sites, but what about the more dodgy ones - you know, those ones where you always think to yourself “Should I be giving this site my adddress?” for fear of your address falling in to the hands of spammers. For these situations OtherInbox is great. For example let’s say that I want to sign up for DodgyWebsite.com but don’t want to give out my real email address, potentially passing it to spammers. Instead, I register with the address dodgywebsite@myusername.otherinbox.com. All messages to this custom address will fall into its own folder in my OtherInbox, where I can read, archive, search, and reply to them in a nice Outlook-style layout. If dodgywebsite.com started spamming the address I used to sign up, all that I need to do to prevent unsolicited mail is to hit the big “Block All” button, which disables that address.

In the screenshot below you can see that I now use OtherInbox for all EBay e-mail. If I ever wanted to block my ebay@username.otherinbox.com address all that I needed to do was hit the Block All button and I would never receive unsolicited e-mails from them again.

Easy, heh?

The option to turn a disabled inbox back on is there if needed.

Receiving multiple non-work related e-mails per day (and being interrupted by them) or checking multiple sites for your updates is a chore, and OtherInbox seems to understand that. Now what I do is check one single site a couple of times a day at a time that suits me and my (real) inbox is for work only.

There are two other simple ways in which you can also receive notifications from OtherInbox.com and I use both of them too. I receive a daily e-mail from OtherInbox with a summary of my daily e-mail and I also subscribe to an RSS feed of all unread e-mail. This feed is added to my RSS reader which I check in on from time to time to stay abreast of the 40 or so blogs that I follow. Having the flexibility to access my OtherInbox in these three ways means that I am never interrupted by non-work / personal e-mail and can access it at a time and in a place when I choose.

OtherInbox can also import messages from any IMAP account, auto-saving and organizing receipts, coupons, etc. This is a great feature - I tried it and it was pretty accurate.

I believe that once you have been using OtherInbox for just a few days, you will wonder what you did without it. It is already a staple part of my workflow. I am told that they will be releasing an iPhone optimised version of the site pretty soon and then later an iPhone application.

This is an application I will be recommending to my clients if I feel that it will benefit them.

Nota bene: you would have noticed that I refer to non-work / personal e-mail in this post. I categorise / prioritise my e-mail in to three groups:
- work-related: obvious
- personal: to my personal address and this is from friends and family
- non-work / personal: this is all other e-mail, e.g. from the bank, frequent flyer programme, social networks etc.

OtherInbox is perfect for the last category.