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OtherInbox, a service that debuts at TC 50, wants to solve on of the oldest and most pressing problems with email, spam and email overload. The way OtherInbox is approaching this is to set up a separate email address for you. You can use this email address when you signup for things/services on Internet. Once that is done the service allows you to filter and tag the incoming emails.
This is unique and innovative and the approach spares your real inbox for emails from real people whom you know in real life. The rest of the automated stuff is left for OtherInbox to be handled automatically. I being a blogger who tries out several services each day find the concept worthwhile. Since every single day I have to skim through dozens of junk or spam emails that shouldnt have been in my inbox, but are there just because I once subscribed to the service.
The service could be used to figure out which services are selling your credentials. The way this is done is that you can make a separate email account for each service on which you are subscribing such as flickr@bilal.otherinbox.com or facebook@bilal.otherinbox.com. Here bilal.otherinbox.com would be my userid at otherinbox. Now, I would know immediately which service sold my email address since I would start to get a lot of emails on that specific flag. This in turn would enable me to immediately block that specific email account.
Speaking on the occasion Joshua Baer, CEO and founder of OtherInbox said:
We started OtherInbox to cure the email overload problem. Over time, we receive more email than we can actually read, and so our Inbox just gets bigger and bigger. Most of the messages clogging up our Inboxes are not sent by people - they are automated notifications such as receipts, shipping notices, alerts, newsletters and promotions - and then there are all the social networking notification emails! With more and more email coming in, we need a better way to read them than one at a time.
It should be pointed out here that a similar thing could be done with Gmail. All you need to do while subscribing to flickr is to use bilal+flickr@gmail.com. And than when you receive emails from flickr you could just do whatever you want with those emails by applying a simple filter. In the presence of this OtherInbox’s primary utility would be to keep the automated stuff out of my inbox.
Several services (notably Facebook, last I checked) disallow the use of plus signs in the address. Spammers are also well aware of the existence of such addresses, and oftentimes simply strip off the bit after the plus sign to avoid detection.
There’s a good writeup of the differences between the two approaches on the OtherInbox blog.