It's In My OtherInbox…

Thank you to Jimmy Gardner for putting together this screencast of OtherInbox including our new Gmail integration.

Finally, The Email Client Evolves

This is Joshua Baer, the founder of OtherInbox. Sorry I haven’t written an update in a while — Leah, Hoon, Caroline, and Erica have been hard at work here while Mike has been working with the product team and I’ve been working on the launch and some exciting partnerships that we have lined up for later in 2009. I also had my first child over the past few months!

We’re looking forward to seeing y’all here in Austin for the annual South by Southwest Interactive, Film and Music festivals March 13-22, 2009. We’ll be opening OtherInbox up to the public, releasing Gmail and calendar integration, presenting at numerous events, throwing a party, and generally just hanging out with all of you who can make it to Austin!

While you’re at the show, stop by our booth and say hi! Come meet Leah, Hoon, myself and other members of the OtherInbox team. We’ll be giving demos, talking about what’s in store for 2009, and giving away a mailbox full of $1,000 in cash!!!

We’re showing some extra love to our Austin peeps by organizing an OtherInbox meetup at Dave and Busters next Tuesday, March 3 at 6:30pm. We’re still a startup, so don’t expect an extravagant affair — but you can meet members of the OtherInbox team and get the inside scoop on our plans for SXSW and the public launch. If that’s not enough, one lucky winner will walk away that evening with a Gold badge to attend the SXSW Interactive and Film festivals worth $695!

Please RSVP for the party so we can plan accordingly!

We’ll be kicking off SXSW at the City of Austin Interactive Showcase on Friday from 5pm-7pm at Fogo de Chao. OtherInbox will be presenting along with 24 other local Austin companies at this exclusive, invitation-only event. This will be particularly fun for me because in addition to representing OtherInbox, I am an investor in 3 other companies presenting at the showcase – Bazaarvoice, B-Side Entertainment and Onespot. We’re honored to be included!

If things go as planned, it will be hard to miss us on the SXSW tradeshow floor this year. We have a double-sized booth that will be staffed by Leah, Hoon, Caroline, Erica, Mike, myself and other members of the team. Our booth has 2 numbers, so look for 213 or 312 at the end of one of the rows. We’ll be giving live demos, signing up new users, and talking about what’s in store for 2009. I have a personal goal to meet as many OtherInbox users at SXSW as possible – if you see me walking around or at the booth please say hi and introduce yourself in person!

We need your help to make SXSW as huge success and spread the word about OtherInbox! There are 2 things you can do to help if you’ll be at SXSW:

1. Sign up to spend 1 hour at the booth with us so that you can share your experiences with other prospective users
2. Wear an OtherInbox t-shirt at SXSW to show your support.

If you’re at SXSW, you probably will notice Mr. Spam. Don’t worry, you’ll recognize him from the cape! Take your picture with Mr. Spam and email it to us to get a chance at the mailbox full of $1,000 in cash. To get an extra chance at the $1,000 and updates on Mr. Spam sightings, follow Mr. Spam on Twitter.

To save some time in the comments, I will answer three popular questions about Mr. Spam now:

1. No, I’m not Mr. Spam.
2. Yes, Mr. Spam really has a cape.
3. Yes, Mr. Spam really has super-powers.

Come hear OtherInbox co-founder Mike Subelsky’s presentation about Scaling Rails Applications in the Cloud. Skeptics argue that Ruby-on-Rails “can’t scale”. In this talk, Mike proves them wrong by demonstrating how cloud computing technologies have changed the game, enabling developers to use the expressiveness of Ruby and Rails to build high-performance applications that scale easily. Includes case study and live scaling demo.

Scaling Rails Applications in the Cloud
Saturday, March 14th
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Room Hilton C

If you liked Mike’s presentation, you’ll want to head straight from there to my presentation titled, Should I Build My Startup on Ruby on Rails? You’ve heard Ruby on Rails is the hottest new technology for developing web applications. You’ve also heard of concerns about scalability and hiring talent. How do you separate the facts from the hype? Hear the business perspective on why to consider Ruby on Rails now and why you might want to wait and see. Get ready for a head-to-head comparison with PHP, Java and .NET!

Should I Build My Startup on Ruby on Rails?
Saturday, March 14th
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Room Hilton D

On Sunday night I’ll be honored as one of the top 25 people in social media in Texas at the Texas Social Media Awards at Ballet Austin. This event will attract the who’s-who in social media and the proceeds go towards a great cause – the Sunshine Camps for high-potential, low-income kids. You can still buy a ticket for $12.

During the day on Monday we’ll be presenting the new, public release of OtherInbox to Guy Kawasaki, Brad King, and others at the SXSW BizSpark Accelerator along with 7 other companies in the Innovative Web Technologies category. I’ll be showing off OtherInbox for Gmail and also our new calendar integration. Please attend the event and wear your OtherInbox t-shirt to show your support!

We’re wrapping up SXSW with a party, of course! OtherInbox is teaming up with FiveRuns to sponsors the SXSW Austin on Rails Party at Buffalo Billiards on Monday night from 6pm-9pm. This is always one of the best parties of the conference! In addition to beer, music, and pool tables there will be other games and lots of interesting geeks to talk to. Of course, Mr. Spam will be there taking pictures. Please RSVP if you plan on coming so that your name will be on the guest list and you’ll get free drink tickets. There are already hundreds of people who have RSVP’d so you’d better do it soon to make sure you get a spot.

Even if you can’t attend the party, please become a fan of OtherInbox on Facebook.

The past few weeks have been very busy. We have been working hard on both bug fixes and fantastic new features that we cannot wait to show our users. As usual, we must thank our users for submitting great feedback and suggestions on our support site. We use your comments and ideas to help us determine what new features to put in place.

This week, we made a number of changes to improve the efficiency and performance of OtherInbox. This is something we will always be optimizing, as we want your OtherInbox experience to be both spiffy and zippy! In addition, a few tweaks have been made to make your OtherInbox experience even better!

We are happy to announce the implementation of a very common request, the ability to create a new mailbox (and email address) when composing a new message. There is no longer a need to create a new mailbox before creating a new message. It is now on one page. Click “New message” and simply choose “…New address” at the bottom of the mailbox drop-down menu.

Although we previously added a Print button to open a message in a full window or tab suitable for printing, our users told us they wanted something even easier. Now, a double-click of any message opens it in a new window or tab.

Also this week, to prove that no idea is too small to be considered, the “Remember Me?” box is no longer automatically checked thanks to a very valid point made by a user.

Have a suggestion on what else we can do to make OtherInbox even awesomer? Submit yours today!

Statesman announces Social Media Awards winners

Inaugural Austin Interactive Showcase

My mother has been teaching first or second grade for more years than she will allow me to admit in this post. Recently, she logged into her email account with the school district while visiting with some fellow teachers in the teacher’s lounge. The first email that popped up informed her how she could enlarge her… well, let’s just say it was not pencil. My mom turned red and immediately logged out of her email. The teachers started talking about how embarrassing all the spam is, how they don’t know where it comes from, and what to do about it.

My mom is a great teacher, but she doesn’t teach technology. She has a hard time checking her voicemail on her brick of a cell phone, let alone being the first to sign up for a cool new beta app for email overload. But, when she called me and told me her story, I knew I had to do something. I talked my mom through signing up for an OtherInbox and even trying out our new “OtherInbox for Gmail” that we are testing with a few of our current beta users. To my surprise, she went through all the steps with ease and little guidance.  When I woke up this morning, I had an email from my aunt, a cousin, and some of my mothers teacher friends asking for OtherInbox.

OtherInbox has attracted some of the most tech savvy people I have ever met, but it can be beneficial to anyone. If you know someone who could use a little help with clearing out embarrassing spam and unwanted junk in their email, get them on our waiting list, and help them gain control of their email again. Oh, and before you ask, my aunt and my mother’s teacher friends are all on the waiting list as well.

On Tuesday we had a problem with the main database server we use to power OtherInbox, which turned out to be a great demonstration of the benefits of the cloud computing infrastructure that OtherInbox uses. Our database had suddenly become unresponsive, which caused the website to stop working. Since our mail delivery system is designed to be heavily redundant and not depend on the database, message delivery was not affected (the messages just queued up until the database became available again).

We spent a few minutes trying to debug what had happened to the database, but as soon as we realized there would be no immediate short-term fix, we immediately launched a new database server, something that is easy to do as our servers are hosted in Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

While the server was launching, I made a new copy of the disk volume where our database is stored. Since we use Amazon Elastic Block Store and take frequent snapshots of that volume, I had a very recent copy to work with. These two actions allowed me to rebuild the database in about ten minutes with no data lost. It took another five or ten minutes to get the rest of our cloud talking to the new database server, and then we were back online.

When everything was up and running, I was able to kill off the old database server. We’ll never know exactly why it failed, but part of the philosophy of cloud computing is you never depend on any one component lasting forever. Our site is running on 25+ EC2 commodity servers which have a small failure rate. They are guaranteed to run forever.  In this case, our database server lasted 133 days before crashing. We’ve had other servers function over 300 days without a problem. For the most critical parts of our site, like the inbound mail servers, we run multiple independent, redundant servers in different parts of EC2, so that one outage would not affect the rest of the site.

In the future, as we grow our service, we plan to add that kind of redundancy to the database server so that occasional cloud hiccups like this will be imperceptible to our users. We’re sorry for the inconvenience but hope this gives you confidence that we are being very careful to preserve your valuable data.

At OtherInbox, we strive to make your lives a little easier. We encourage our users to try new tricks with their OIB and to share their stories with us at myoib[at]LChaney.oib.com. Recently, we received the story below, which explains how using OtherInbox can not only organize your email but can also keep you from missing golden nuggets that might otherwise be lost.

Our company makes iPhone apps and we use OIB as our external communication tool.

Last night I came across a mailbox we had never setup or given out, someone was “guessing” an email address. Turns out the individual was from Apple Developer Relations, and was requesting a special demo version and artwork release so they can use it in “marketing opportunities”. We’re thrilled to say the least.

Had we not used OIB, that email would have probably bounced and/or been delayed. We were able to respond immediately to their request, and meet their submission deadline of Feb. 6th. Now we can breath for 3 days knowing there is plenty of time for them to get back to us.
—Colin