Other Inbox: Managing Email Spam

The influential startup blog TechCrunch is currently hosting their big TechCrunch50 event, where 50 new startups are launched to much fanfare (among a pool of more than 1000 candidates).  You can view presentations about these companies and vote on your favorite.

At the moment, the startup with the most votes is www.otherinbox.com, a service that helps you manage email spam.  Here’s a video that explains how they do it.  The basic idea is that instead of using your regular email address (joe@hotmail.com) when you register at various websites around the web, you instead create a bunch of different email addresses: flickr@joe.otherinbox.com, ebay@joe.otherinbox.com, facebook@joe.otherinbox.com, and so on.  If you suddenly start getting email from Netflix addressed to ebay@joe.otherinbox.com, then you’ll know that ebay shared your email address with Netflix (or that Netflix somehow got that address in other ways).  You can then choose to call up ebay and say “WTF?” or to simply block emails going to that address.

I’ve been using this technique for a few years now.  I have my own domain (let’s call it ShahafRules.com — I don’t want to post the real one here) and I create various addresses when I register around the web: flickr@ShahafRules.com, blockbuster@ShahafRules.com, etc.  Emails that are sent to any of these addresses are forwarded to my regular email account (currently gmail).  But since they all have different “To:” addresses, I can define various rules to filter out spam.

I originally created this setup not as a way to block spam but rather as a way to avoid being too attached to a single email provider.  If one day I decide that I don’t like gmail, I can create an account elsewhere and start forwarding my emails there (and I don’t have to tell my friends and family to update their address books!).  But fighting spam was an added benefit.

In the few years that I’ve been using this system, I haven’t had many situations where I register my account with company A and they share my email address with company B who then starts spamming me.  I try to be diligent about unchecking all the checkboxes that might cause extra spam to come my way (“email me special promotions”, etc.), and for the most part I’ve found that websites are honest.  If they weren’t their reputation would suffer, and reputation is the hardest thing to fix (I still dislike Real Player for all the crap it placed on my computer when I installed it years ago).

One issue I ran into with this multiple-email-address strategy has to do with unregistering from email lists.  Hypothetical situation: let’s say I created an account on Time Magazine’s website (time@ShahafRules.com) and request a weekly email with headlines.  After a while I decide that I don’t have time for these emails so I want them to stop.  No problem, the emails all say “to unsubscribe, simply reply to this message”.  The trouble is that if I reply, the reply will come from my gmail account (not from time@ShahafRules.com) so the unregistration process doesn’t work.  To fix this, I need to somehow get my gmail account to send an email as if it came from time@ShahafRules.com.  Luckily this is doable, but it’s a bit of a pain to manage.

Another issue is that I don’t always remember exactly which email address I used.  Was it time@ShahafRules.com, time.com@ShahafRules.com, or TimeMagazine@ShahafRules.com?  It used to be that I had a single email address but several passwords that I used for all my accounts around the internet.  Now I have both different email addresses and different passwords.  It’s getting harder to keep track of it all.

UPDATE

The folks from www.otherinbox.com noticed my post and decided to extend to me an invitation to their private beta.  I just created my account on their site.  Here are my thoughts.

First off, to be honest, I’m not sure how much I will my otherinbox account.  Why?

1. Like I said above, I already have a system like this in place to fight spam so why change?
2. I really don’t have a spam problem at the moment, so why spend time trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?
3. If this otherinbox company fails and goes away then I’ll be up a creek.  Why?  Because I will then need to go to each merchant separately and tell them to no longer send emails to ebay/time/flickr@ShahafRules.otherinbox.com and instead to use some other address.  What a pain.

Nontheless, I created my otherinbox account, mostly because I was curious to see the details of their UX.  So far I can say that the UI is very clean and slick, with an Outlook-style layout.  There are buttons at the bottom that let you change the layout, but it appears that they are not implemented yet.  Also, the “compose mail” button is at the bottom (not the top) which is an interesting and non-obvious choice, and when you click it you get a new tab to actually compose your email (which seems like a fine choice to me).

There’s a lot of upcoming functionality that isn’t implemented yet.  It looks like in the future they will automatically recognize emails that have receipts, coupons, and meeting invitations, and they will give you a specialized UI to manage those things — but none of this functionality is available right now.

If you want to check out otherinbox, you can use the same invitation URL that I used.  They say it’s good for up to 25 more accounts, so first come first served:

http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/Shahaf