John Reel’s Blog

Why the heck didn’t I think of this?

Last week I reached a milestone of 30,000 unread e-mails.  Beat that!

Over the years, I’ve come up with various methods to deal with all the lists I sign up to.  For instance, since I had my own server, I setup a catch-all e-mail account for lists, and then I would sign up with ListName@MyDomain.com for each list.  Then if I got spam email going to one of those addresses, I knew who the culprit was, and could just redirect that email address to null and void.

That got tedious so I eventually just made up a single e-mail address for all the lists I’m on and all the products I buy and just let it collect there.  For a while I would setup rules to collate those emails into separate folders, but that was too much work so they now all end up in one big-ass folder.  Sometimes I glance at the subjects for something interesting, but I hardly ever read them.  

Well, someone took those two approaches and combined them into a new service called OtherInbox.  I just nabbed one of the 500 beta invites from TechCrunch, and boy am I happy!

This beautiful service lets me create email addresses at their domain, one for each list, just like I used to do.  Then it automatically removes any emails coming to that address that don’t belong, meaning I don’t have to bother with the spam or redirecting those emails to null.  Then it goes a step further and organizes all that email by each list.  

It’s everything I wanted for dealing with lists, rolled up into one, and automated!

Now, I just need to setup something on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get 1,000 workers to move my 30,000 unread e-mails into there, unsubscribe me from all my lists, and resubscribe me with the my new OtherInbox email address.  lol.

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