OtherInbox: A Mailbox For Spam

OtherInbox wants to help you keep spam out of your regular email inbox. The company gives you a virtually unlimited amount of disposable email addresses to use whenever you think somebody might start sending you spam or sell your address to spammers. Unlike other disposable email services, OtherInbox doesn't just give you a random email address, but a personal sub-domain to which you can add an unlimited amount of addresses. OtherInbox is currently in private beta, but we were able to get a few invites for our readers.

Unlimited Addresses

Once you have registered your sub-domain, you don't have to register the actual email addresses you want to use. Instead, any email sent to your sub-domain, no matter the part before the '@,' will arrive in your inbox. By default, OtherInbox filters incoming email by sender, but it also makes sense to sign up for new services with addresses like "123onlinestore@xxx.otherinbox.com" so that you can keep track on who is potentially selling your email address to spammers.

By default, OtherInbox will email the first message that comes in from a new address to your standard email account. Every forwarded message is prefaced by a number of links that allow you to turn of forwarding messages from this address or to block further messages from this sender. You can also have Otherinbox send you a daily digest of new messages. IMAP support is forthcoming.

Controlling Spam

There are a large number of potential uses for OtherInbox, but the most straightforward is to use it for signing up for new services online. If a company starts sending you spam, you can just block every email from this service or to this email address with just one click.

The OtherInbox interface is similar to that of pretty much every other online email service (and actually quite reminiscent of Apple's MobileMe), but the main difference is that OtherInbox automatically filters your mail by sender and creates a folder for every sender (see screenshot).

What About Gmail?

If you are already using Gmail, you could, of course, make use of the "+" feature, which allows you to create email address like "john123+facebook@gmail.com," but Gmail does not filter those out automatically like OtherInbox would, which means you would still have to create a filter for every one of those addresses. Over time, that simply takes too much time and work.

Verdict

Overall, OtherInbox is the slickest disposable address service we have seen so far. While other services like GuerillaMail, MintEmail, or e4ward offer similar services, none of them feature the simple user interface and complete set of features that OtherInbox does.