I just ordered the license plate for my Tesla roadster set to arrive in November. TESLA and PLUGIN were taken, so I went with a different word very dear to my heart, EMAIL!

It’s been three weeks since we launched at TechCrunch50 and what a ride it’s been! We’ve been covered by 4 of the top 5 blogs in the world and were mentioned in the Washington Post twice! More than 7,000 people have signed up for the private beta and almost 40,000 OtherInbox addresses have been used.

It feels so good to hear the excitement from new users! We have more than 500 followers on Twitter @otherinbox, hundreds of users on our Google Group , and tons of great feature suggestions on Get Satisfaction.

Expanded Browser Support

We’re working hard to be responsive to user feedback and plan on releasing new versions of the service every week on Thursday or Friday. This past week we released support for Internet Explorer and Chrome (in addition to Firefox and Safari), performance tweaks, and the ability to create new mailboxes manually.

Exclusive Beta Invitations

This week we also gave every user three invitations to share with a friend! If you look in the upper right-hand corner of the screen you’ll see a new “invite friends” link. You can share OtherInbox with a friend who you think has email overload and could use the cure. But use them carefully — you only have three!

What’s coming up next?

We’re hard at work on new features for OtherInbox — both big and small! What you see now is just the beginning of our vision and we are hard at work on major new functionality in addition to little tweaks we make in response to user feedback. Some of the things you can expect to see in the next month are an iPhone version of the website, RSS support, and an import wizard to consolidate email from your previous email accounts.

Your input is really important in deciding what we do next! Please visit our Get Satisfaction site at help.otherinbox.com and click to vote for features that are most important to you! Each week we’re going to pick one of the features with the most votes.

Ruby on Rails fans should read Mike Subelsky’s interview on the Five Runs blog. In the interview, Mike is talks about GitHub, agile development, JavaScript frameworks, Merb, and Amazon Web Services. Five Runs is a Ruby on Rails systems management company that is also based here in Austin.

Gregory Pittman is one of more than 5,000 new users to try OtherInbox since our launch at TechCrunch50 last week. He shared with us how OtherInbox has helped to cure his email overload on his Blackberry!

As a worship pastor and music professor who also blogs and maintains a lot of online activity, having access to e-mail on my BlackBerry has been an important aspect of my productivity for a long time. Since my preferred method of communication is e-mail, that meant my BlackBerry device was alerting me to a new message dozens — if not hundreds — of times a day. Most of these messages, however, ended up being from social networking sites I use, or sale alerts from software vendors, or some other sort of automated systems. Obviously, these messages didn’t need immediate responses, but the filter system on the BlackBerry is cumbersome. I could keep the messages from coming to the device but they still clogged my inbox. Labels and filters in Gmail work only marginally well for “I want this e-mail but it isn’t urgent” material.

I recently started using OtherInbox and my BlackBerry has suddenly gone silent. No more notifications from Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, or any of the other potential e-mail sources I need to keep in touch with but don’t want accumulating in my regular inbox or bothering me at dinner. Instead, I took about fifteen minutes to sign into all of these services and change my contact address to an OtherInbox address. These messages are now filtered into their own folder at OtherInbox instead of piling up in one long list of unread messages in Gmail. But, most importantly, now when my BlackBerry alerts me to the arrival of a new message, I know it’s one I need to pay attention to. There are fewer distractions during family time (which my wife loves) and less time spent pulling the device out of my pocket only to realize the message could have waited. I didn’t realize until they stopped just how annoying that was; I had chalked up all the extra messages as part of the cost of doing business with a BlackBerry.

I’m looking forward to OtherInbox’s help in maintaining sanity and productivity.

—Gregory Pittman

Gregg Pollack filmed me and the other Lone Star Ruby Conference speakers doing 30 second versions of our talks. So if you missed the conference, here’s me using excessive hand gestures to explain why Ruby is so great for cloud computing. The entire hour-long talk is also available with fewer hand gestures.

Last week we launched OtherInbox to the world at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco and since then we’ve been overwhelmed by the response! We were the last company to present on Monday, and even though it had been a long day we still received a resounding cheer from the crowd at the end of our demo. It was obvious that the TechCrunch50 crowd all have email overload and would benefit from OtherInbox!

Almost 1,500 new users signed up for the beta program in the first two days and another 2,000 are on the waiting list. We received broad coverage in the press including 4 of the top 5 blogs in the world and the Washington Post. Plus almost a thousand tweets!

We just want to say thank you to all our friends on Twitter and share some of our favorite Tweets! Follow us on Twitter to get an exclusive beta invitation!

everyone should be using otherinbox.com i’m a beta tester now, its amazing

–kurtm85

@otherinbox Thanks so much. It looks awesome and I will be using the heck out of it. Converting all my Bacn over to it.

–merlik

Great service from @otherinbox who noticed my gripe on Twitter and responded within 30 mins.

–philmorle

OtherInbox, you’re proving to be truly awesome, but please, for me, make a viable mobile version. Please?

–geekgrrl

@otherinbox it’s a very useful service. I’ve been moving my newsletters and other non-important mail over there as it comes in.

–Eyebee

Yessss! Got an invite to @otherinbox. Great idea, guys!

–rickfu

@otherinbox how did I live so long without you?

–kurtm85

Other Inbox, in the tech crunch 50, has to be the best concept since sliced bread. http://www.otherinbox.com

–do_re_mi

okay, just got my first “real” notice from @otherinbox about junk I’d received. Totally bad ass.

–benkimball

Wow OtherInbox is such a brilliant idea!

–JayC_

I have been testing http://otherinbox.com for the last two days now and find it really useful. They are also on twitter @otherinbox

–FabianPattberg

@otherinbox Your interface design is so simple and clean. I can’t wait to get my hands on it! – http://bit.ly/3iSYQA

–chadpaulson

otherinbox.com is pretty cool. now i can use it to sign up for also these beta sites

–jcataldo

Checking out @otherinbox. I think I’ll be using this service often.

–twofivethreetwo

@bindela you are right otherinbox.com sounds interesting. I’d love to have my email arrive sorted.

–hravan

@otherinbox you guys rock! Totally awesome service, I hope you guys get the prize money @ TC50!

–digitalknk

holy cow @otherinbox support is fast.

–benkimball

I just used my @otherinbox for the first time, making a campaign donation. I desperately want OtherCellPhone. @joshuabaer pls build kthx.

–benkimball

ust signed up for OtherInbox; no more sending all e-mail to my filter gmail account! Yes!

–snafilter

Spam can be pretty confusing. I doubt that very many people actually ask to receive Viagra advertisements by email, yet they just start to appear. Did they make up my email address? Or did they get it from another website that I gave it to?

There are basically five reasons why we get spam.

1. We give our email address to a website, and they send us email we didn’t expect
2. We give our email address to a website, and they sell it to other websites
3. We give our email address to a website, and they get hacked
4. Someone’s computer gets a virus, and we get spam because we are in their address book
5. We post our email address on a website somewhere, and spammers “harvest” it off the web

It’s always one of these reasons. If you create a new email address and don’t ever use it to sign up for anything or post it anywhere, you won’t receive any spam. We get spam as a result of using the email address to buy things, sign up for newsletters, and email other people. For every spam email message we receive, there was an action we took that caused it.

The first three are probably the most common. The last two happen less frequently but when they do, your email address is pretty much hosed. When you only have one email address, it’s a Pandora’s Box. Once the box is open and your email address gets into the hands of spammers, you can’t take it back. Lets look at each case in more detail:

We give our email address to a website, and they send us email we didn’t expect

Probably the most common reason for getting spam is that we just don’t realize what it is we’re signing up for. Every website has a Privacy Policy and there is usually a page or more of “fine print” that nobody ever reads. For example, most people would never think that signing up for Wired Magazine would cause them to receive emails about other magazines such as Glamour and Style. It’s not that Wired readers are likely to be interested in Glamour — its just that Glamour and Wired are both run by the same company – Condé Nast.

Like many other conglomerates, Condé Nast cross-markets one magazine to the readers of the other magazines. Legally this is perfectly fine and their privacy policy explicitly gives them the right to do this. But its not what we expect. When the email message arrives promoting Glamour Magazine, we don’t realize that the reason why we received the Glamour email message is because we signed up for Wired. Even if we unsubscribe from Wired, we might continue to receive email messages about other magazines. In order to stop these emails, we need to unsubscribe from Condé Nast as a whole. But that’s very unlikely because we don’t really know who Condé Nast is to begin with. So we have to unsubscribe from each brand individually and wonder why we keep receiving email messages about different magazines that we have never signed up for. It’s pretty confusing!

We give our email address to a website, and they sell it to other websites

Most people would be amazed at how much our personal information is bought and sold without our knowledge. Credit card companies make a lot of money from interest payments and fees, but they make more money from tracking our purchase behavior and selling this information to other companies. Sometimes this is called “Lead Generation” and other times it is called “Data Append”. Whatever you call it, there are mature and sophisticated industries built around the buying and selling of personal information.

Some companies have whole business models built on this concept. An example of a company with pretty good practices is LendingTree.com. We sign up at LendingTree.com if we’re interested in refinancing our home. Their pitch is that by telling them all about the loan you need, they will find the best rate for you among multiple lenders. They way they accomplish this is by selling your information to lenders as a “lead”. Lending Tree doesn’t show you loans that would save you money unless the lender is willing to pay them for the lead. This is a “good” example because its pretty clear what’s going on. We know that when we sign up at LendingTree.com, we’re going to receive emails about loan offers. The only problem comes after we decide on a lender – all of the other lenders still have our email address and there is a good chance we’ll be receiving email messages with loan offers for years to come.

The bad examples are when this happens without us knowing it. The most notorious example of this is called “co-registration” and is also an industry of its own. Depending on how good your spam filter is, you may have seen email messages with subject lines such as “Win a free iPod”, “Do you like Coke or Pepsi?”, or “Party with a star!”. These promotions are designed to draw us into a website where we are presented with a series of offers to refinance our house, get a new credit card, get an online educational degree or to get free DVD’s from Columbia House. In order to win our free iPod, we have to register for a certain number of the other promotional offers. For every promotional offer that we fill out, the website gets paid a bounty. They pay for your free iPod out of the bounties they collect. Most people that sign up want the free iPod, but aren’t interested in the promotional offers.

There are a zillion other variations of this model that fall somewhere between the “pretty good” practices of LendingTree.com and the “bad” practices of the site offering you a free iPod.

We give our email address to a website, and they get hacked

We don’t hear about this much, but it happens much more than most people realize. You register at a website and then that website gets hacked and their customer list is stolen by spammers. Or maybe an employee gets fired and steals a copy of the customer list on his way out.

*This happens a lot.* We just never hear about it. Why? First of all most of the time no actually knows about it. Without OtherInbox, they have no way of knowing what caused the spam or which list is being abused. Most companies wouldn’t know if their own customer list was stolen.

Second, when it does happen, they don’t want to tell us about it! They don’t want anyone to know that they were the cause of the security breach and they try to just “make it go away”.

Someone’s computer gets a virus, and we get spam because we are in their address book

In this example, someone accidentally downloads a virus or other malware that infects their personal computer. It looks through their email address book for valid email addresses to spam.

We post our email address on a website somewhere, and spammers “harvest” it off the web

As much as we try to avoid it, there are certain times where we have to post our email address publicly on a web page. For example, some message boards and email lists will cause our email address to be displayed publicly in the archives. Another example is the email address listed in the Whois DNS record when we register a domain name. Posting an email address on a web page is a guaranteed way to attract spam. Harvesting email addresses of web pages is illegal, but it is still a common practice.

What else?

Can you think of other causes of spam that I’m missing?

How many email accounts do you have? A work account? An account from your ISP? How many Gmail or Yahoo! Mail accounts do you have? If you have multiple, chances are that one of them is your “other inbox”.

It’s the one that you use to buy things online, sign up for newsletters, and anytime you don’t want the email to clutter up your work inbox. When you are on a website and it asks for your email address, you make a quick decision — Do I want this email to come to my work email address, or should I send it to the other one I don’t check as frequently?

This practice is very common – David Daniels from Jupiter Research (now Forrester Research) recently found that 75% of email users have at least 2 email addresses. Some people I know have a handful of email addresses. I won’t even tell you how many I have!

You don’t these messages coming to your work inbox for a number of reasons:

• These messages are less important so you don’t need to see them right away
• You think its likely that you will get spam from this website
• These messages are inappropriate for your work email address
• You need to provide an email address in order to get to the page you want to see
• You know you only want to see the first email they send you, and none after that
• You don’t really want these messages at all

If you’re really sophisticated, you might have one email address provided by your work, another that you use for personal communications, and a third that is your “other inbox”. Maybe you check them all separately, or maybe you configure Outlook or other email program to check all of the accounts in one place.

Another way to look at it is that your work inbox is for emails that get sent by real people and your other inbox is for emails that get sent automatically by computers. The emails from people are the ones that you want to see right away and respond to. The emails from computers are the ones that can usually wait until you are ready to look at them.

This is great because many people spend most of their day with their email open. Rather than getting distracted by the less important “other” stuff, you only get notified about new messages from real people that actually may require a response. Then once or twice a day, or once or twice a week, you can check your “other inbox” and clear it out much more quickly than if you have to scan closely for important emails mixed in with the other stuff.

Before I separated things out, I would have more than a hundred messages in my inbox when I woke up every morning. Most people were sleeping at the same time as me, so almost of all them were automated messages sent by computers. Only a handful were sent by real people. Now that I have everything separated out, I only have a few messages waiting for me in the morning instead of more than a hundred. The rest are waiting in my “other inbox” for me to review at my leisure.

Get your OtherInbox and get all that junk out of your work email account.