In this day and age, information overload is a very real problem. And chief amongst the sources of information overload is your e-mail inbox. I get a LOT of email every day. Sometimes (and more often than I’d like to admit) emails go unanswered for way too long simply because I am overloaded. Not only with things to do, but incoming communications.

OtherInbox.com is a new tool, just announced last month, that is working to change that.

OtherInbox.com is a web-based email system that does something different – it organizes your incoming email based on type. It also provides you control over the email address that you hand out to other websites. When you view your inbox in OtherInbox, your messages will be organized by sender. You can quickly tell which senders are sending you the most email and you can decide whether you want to deal with it or not. But, OtherInbox goes further than that.

When you sign up, you get your own sub-domain such as [yourname].otherinbox.com. On that sub-domain, you can make up any email address you want and it will all arrive at the same inbox. For example, if you sign up for any of the PCMech email lists, you could use pcmech@[yourname].otherinbox.com. You could give Facebook an address of facebook@[yourname].otherinbox.com. You don’t have to create and configure these accounts beforehand. Just make them up as you go and they’ll all be filed accordingly in your OtherInbox account.

Once you have this going, you can easily block email so it doesn’t bother you. Getting tired of all the email from Facebook apps? Just block email coming from Facebook. Or if you all of a sudden start seeing a lot of spam, you can tell who sold your email address by looking at which of your OtherInBox folders the message arrived.

Now, OtherInbox is currently in private beta testing so you will need an invite code. However, if you follow @otherinbox on Twitter, you can probably get one. You can also sign up to get an invite code directly on their site. As of this writing, you can sign up via this link (don’t know how long that will last).

EDIT: We got a super-private link from the folks at OtherInbox to share with you. You can sign up at http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/pcmech. The link is valid for 50 invites. First come, first serve!

Definitely a Beta

I signed up and had it begin importing email via IMAP from my Gmail account. After some time, it reported that it was done importing my email. Note that it doesn’t mess with your existing email account. I noticed, however, that it failed to import almost all of my email. Plus, it seemed to randomly import messages from all over the timeline. For example, it skipped current messages while importing others from 2007. So, I most certainly cannot vouch for the Gmail import, however there are reasons why this is still in beta testing. Plus, my Gmail account probably has more email than most. And it is probably only importing from senders that OtherInbox recognizes and can categorize.

The Receipts, Coupons and Calendar functions at the top don’t work yet. It says they are Coming Soon. The settings which are available are pretty sparse. And when you go to send a message, there is no way to back out. Plus, there are absolutely no formatting functions so it is basically a text email.

These shortcomings aside, OtherInbox is clearly not meant to be used to REPLACE your existing email address. Instead, it would be used exactly like the name says – as your OTHER inbox. I would use my usual address to correspond with people. However, when I need to submit an email address to a web-based service, I could use an OtherInbox.com account instead of my usual address. The “Compose Email” feature is very weak in OtherInbox, but you likely will never use it anyway because this service is meant to be used to handle incoming email from things you won’t usually talk back to: Twitter, Facebook, Email Lists, Forums, etc.

Worth Watching

At PCMech, we like to talk about new, emerging stuff. The new, shiny stuff. And OtherInbox is definitely one to keep an eye on. As I said, they are brand new, but definitely something worth watching.