We have to say we were a bit surprised by the results!

51% of the respondents said they were email hoarders. Hoarders hold on to everything and rarely delete anything outta their inbox. They have little reason to really. Webmail products such as Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL and Hotmail keep adding storage so we have been conditioned to think that we should never delete anything. In the new consumer cloud, there is more than enough space for all those things you might have to go back and dig out of your inbox.

Why do hoarders have a hard time getting rid of emails? Here’s 5 things that might be driving our collective non action.

5- Cluelessness- Some peeps have no idea what is going on in their inbox. They just know they have a lot of email!

4- Reference- Sometimes you gotta go back and check the tape.

3- Phone numbers and addresses – What was that phone number again?

2- Attachments- That photo of your cute nephew on the pony? He can’t ride that pony anymore.

1- Laziness- We got all the hard drive space in the world, right? Right?

Whatever reason you have for holding on to email, we got your back with Organizer!

Organizer is perfect for making sense of those less-than-important messages you get by automatically organizing them into folders and leaving space in your inbox for all the other stuff you probably won’t get around to deleting or archiving anytime soon. =)

So we set up two new folders for his countless ACDLA and Alacourt emails. In Gmail, under “manage labels” we created a new label – OIB ACDLA and OIB Alacourt.

I was sure to nest it under the OIB folder so Dad’s sidebar stays nice and neat!

Then we took a look at all the fluff. You know, the stuff my dad doesn’t care about but for some reason he just ignores when it comes in. Yep, it was time for the OIB Unsubscribe folder!

We unsubscribed my Dad from a newsletter he’s had in his inbox since 2007. He couldn’t believe it was so easy to get rid of. Now he can safely and easily unsubscribe from stuff anytime!

So we started with 15,000 emails in Dad’s inbox…  After Organizer? 200!

My Dad is very very pleased! And with his email straightened out, Mom is happy too – especially since Dad won’t be asking her “did you delete that email?” Mom is an highly organized individual. Dad?  Well, not so much… but now at least his gmail account can be!

We have compiled a few ideas about our users’ IQ or Inbox Quotient! It’s not a number and it’s not scientific but it is an interesting way to think about your email habits and how you might improve them.. with Organizer! =)

How quickly do you go through your inbox? Or are you constantly at Inbox Zero? If you maintain forwarders, filters, labels and signatures you are likely what we call an email PRO!

You Pros have it all figured out. You run filters and maintain folders and labels on your multiple inboxes so you can deal with the barrage of email you get on your own terms. But we think that even seasoned professionals can use a helping hand now and then!

Organizer is like a built in automatic, administrative super assistant that helps Pros be even more… Pro. Incoming emails, receipts, coupons and shipping notices are automatically organized and you are updated in a great looking dashboard style layout we call the Daily Digest.

Wouldn’t you like an admin like that? Organizer is ready!

So are you ready to move up to the next level of Pro? Tweet us on Twitter, like us on Facebook and tell us!

In fact, like us, follow us or try us all throughout the month of June and you’ll be automatically entered to win an iPad 2! Good luck.

This week, Email is alive and well!

This week Yahoo! announced the latest updates to their 284 million strong webmail product with our very own Organizer among the list of features! In Yahoo! Organizer is known as Automatic Organizer.

And what great timing! In about 10 days or so we will have surpassed our 1 millionth sign-up and don’t see any slow down in sight. People dig having their inbox organized, prioritized and summarized!

Why upgrade webmail?

Have you ever wondered why Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft’s Hotmail would continue to add services and updates to the webmail format while folks claim the end is nigh?

The fact of the matter is, email is a great entry point for content and a lead in for other service offerings. Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft Hotmail and, of course AOL, all benefit from having millions of people pass through their portals on the way to their messages.

Need proof? This April, Yahoo! Blogs delivered 506 MILLION page views. That’s more than any other blogging network including Huffington Post, Gawker, Word Press and Blogger. Huge!

Try out the new Yahoo! Mail!

So Yahoo users rejoice! Upgrade today, try it on and find your next email Nirvana! Our money’s on that it will include some automation…. Like Organizer!

Yep, our Organizer Daily Digest, alongside coupons, special offers and shipping notices, now highlights your electronic receipts!

NOTE – Below, you see my iTunes receipt for the new Dangermouse and Daniele Luppi album, “Rome.” Highly recommended! =)

TIP- Quickly scan your Digest subject lines for the word “receipt” to find your highlighted receipts.

We are certain Digest fans will dig the new feature and use it to keep track of their online purchases. With your Daily Digest you can track a purchase from the point of sale to the actual ship notice. Pretty sweet!

What else do you want to see in your Digest?
Tell us on Facebook, tweet at us on Twitter or send us a good ol’ email, help@otherinbox.com.

OtherInbox has been helping people manage their email in one way or another since 2008. Our flagship product, Organizer has really resonated with email users all over the web. In fact, we are happy to announce that sometime in the next couple of weeks we will surpass our 1 MILLIONTH sign-up! That’s right, OtherInbox Organizer has nearly a million subscribers!

We’ve organized countless emails, helping our users keep their inboxes in tip top shape with our automatic organization, Daily Digest and the super simple Unsubscribe Folder!

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

With nearly ONE MILLION USERS later, we have learned a couple of things…

1- Spam is not a huge issue. Bacn is!

Email and internet service providers have really cracked down on spam. Take a look at your spam folder and you’ll see just how good webmail has gotten at catching your salty, spicy ham flavored emails! So that leaves bacn. Bacn is all those things you willingly sign up for (but don’t have time to read) and is the real problem most people have in their inbox!

2- We’ve learned simplicity is key.

Make things easy for someone and they respond. Organizer is super easy to use, that’s why people like it. Someone called our 1-step Unsubscribe Folder the greatest thing since the addition of the RFC 2369 header!

Nerd alert!- RFC 2369 is the header in an email that allows a recipient to unsubscribe from an email list.

3- People’s inboxes are unique.

Some people hold onto everything, some are at Inbox Zero or close. Some peeps sign up for everything and read everything, others sign up for everything and read nothing and still others are so meticulous about who they sign up for, that their email inbox is like a dietitian’s refrigerator; nothing but leafy green archives and turkey everything.

WHATS YOUR IQ?

So, based on what we’ve seen, we think our users fall into one of four types of email personas. The Hoarder, the Pro, the Shopper and the Socialite. Now, everyone uses their email for personal messaging and some peeps are more than one type of profile but some habits are hard to ignore. Habits such as…

• How soon they delete or archive email…. if ever!
• Whether they use labels, filters or folders.
• How many different senders they subscribe to.

These characteristics and more can make up what we call your INBOX QUOTIENT or simply, IQ.

It’s not a number and it’s not scientific but it is an interesting way to think about your email habits and how you might improve them. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll look at what makes a Pro tick, why Hoarders may not ever get rid of an old email, what do Shoppers really want and finally, explore a Socialite’s obsession with how many twitter followers they might have!

We are very excited to be on the verge of one million users! Not many technology startups can do that and we are leading the pack in the online email application space. If you are among the more than 950,000 Organizer users, thanks! If not, please try Organizer and divide and conquer your inbox!

Keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook in the next couple of weeks! Sharing YOUR IQ just might win you something sweet to read your emails on!

I just got back from Jazzfest in NOLA, catching amazing music and eating as much Cajun/Creole food as I possibly could w/o exploding! I simply did not have time to read all of my email so being able to quickly skim the Digest was awesome!

With my Daily Digest, I don’t always need to open all my mail…. at least not right away. Think about it, new friends and followers, new invites to cool events, newsletters and all the other stuff I sign up for are set up in one nice package.

I like to look at it like a daily mini magazine; one that knows all about me and sometimes offers great deals too!

Yep, the Digest has great deals now too! Last week we ran a couple of Mother’s Day specials that were uber cool.

My mom got a lil’ something from Amazon and I didn’t have to pay for shipping?

Thanks Daily Digest!

Here at OtherInbox HQ we have been watching the media response to the Epsilon data breach and it reminds us of a primer we wrote a while back about the many ways SPAM can find its way to you. (Dunno bout you but the first time I saw a Viagra email in my inbox, I thought an ex was playing a cruel joke on me…)

We see about 5 ways that spammers get their spammy clutches on our email addys.

1- We are mislead. We give our email address to a website and they send us email we did not expect.

-This happens a lot and it is often our own fault. By not reading the fine print, we can find ourselves signing up for a slew of other senders along with the things we actually do want to receive. Watch for pre-checked boxes and reverse opt ins too. If the tactic works, marketers will use em.

2- We are betrayed. We give our email address to a website and they sell it to other websites.

-Lead generation, co-registration, data append.. whatever the term and whatever the method, the selling and buying of personal information is a very lucrative industry! When we are told about it up front, it can be quite helpful if the shared sites are getting us to info we need or want but it does not always happen that way! Not sure about the site you are about to share your info with? Try OIB.ME,  a FREE user curated resource we set up so you can review and share info about web marketers email practices. We see it all at OIB.ME …. so before you sign up for an online newsletter or notification, check out what other folks have to say about that sender!

3- We are the spoils of war. We give our email address to a website and it gets hacked.

As we said above, the market for personal information is very hot! So sometimes people take the info against our will. This is what happened to Epsilon. This can be tracked if the hacked organization is upfront about it and does a good job of notifying affected consumers. Unfortunately, the data can also be “sneakernetted” by an employee with little to no way of knowing how it got breached. Once in a previous job, I was blatantly asked if I would be willing to “personally sell” a portion of SXSW’s music mailing list. Ummm, no.

4-We are unlucky.  Someone’s computer gets a virus and we are in their address book.

This is one of the worst and is pretty difficult to track down! A lot of viral mechanisms are set to do exactly the following; Virus enters your computer. Virus finds address book. Virus sends out a tremendous number of spam messages from your computer which is now a host machine. You can try to remove the virus but your computer is now part of a network of spam bots. You can unplug it but the spam bots might then try to use your own body for energy….Yep kinda like “The Matrix.”

5- We are innocent bystanders. We post our email address on a website somewhere and spammers “harvested” it off the web.

Harvesting email addys off of the internet is quite a chore! (I’ve done it with a simple Apple Automator script) It is impossible to track down since it is really a low res operation but there is a solution. Don’t put your email addy online. If you do, at least make sure it is not your primary email address. Try this-  Google your email address. Wowzers huh? Fix it with a catch all or a pseudo email addy! Done.

So sure, spam is an ongoing problem… but we are not completely powerless even when there are breaches. So why all the hubbub? Likely because we are already on the edge of our seats… waiting for some sort of data apocalypse.

And for some, maybe it has already come! If you live in Texas (like we do) you should know the state records have been compromised! That. Is. Scary. But it brings about a great question- Who is our info safe with if a state agency cannot keep it under control?

Let us know about your experience with spammy email! Did you get any funky emails after Epsilon? Or even better, add a review on OIB.ME so others can know we took one for the team, together!

Twitter – Facebook- Email – *Ping us!

It’s super simple. If you can drag n drop or label an email, you’re done!

It’s a major time and effort saver! In January we calculated that we save our users over 43 days every WEEK! (feel free to check our math!)

The emails are not just hidden, we actually work in the background to get you removed from that list!

Yeah, we are mighty proud of the Unsubscribe Folder. But some of you asked if it was possible to not send out  a confirmation email every time you drop an email into the folder.

So… DRUMROLL PLEEZ ….NOW you can control that!

On the application settings page scroll down to the Notifications section and now you can opt in/out of getting the unsubscribe confirmation emails. See below-

Simple as that, you ask, we listen.

OtherInbox’s Unsubscribe Folder! Because you might want the Dave Matthews’s Grilled Cheese Recipe Database Newsletter for a little while but, after the tour, you might like to be able to unsubscribe as if it never happened. =)

What do you think about the mighty, mighty Unsubscribe Folder? Unsubbed from anything interesting lately? Chime in, any number of ways…

That’s what happens when the biggest party in interactive technology is held in our hometown of Austin, Texas. SXSW.

From 8 floors above we watched as the best and brightest in tech and entertainment did their thing. Last week we talked about all the stuff we were involved in — Startup Crawl, IgniteSXSW and much more — also, we launched Organizer across the pond! Peeps in the UK can now have their inboxes sorted out too!

Lots of amazing things went down in March but we have yet to address one very important thing that happened last month.

Smart Labels.

Right before SX, Google quietly announced the implementation of Smart Labels in Google Labs. Smart labels is their new feature that uses Priority Inbox technology to automatically organize incoming email by certain categories.

Yeah, Google and OtherInbox showed up at the ball wearing the same outfit! Truth be told, we are totally flattered!

So, rather than remind everyone that our own Organizer has a much more robust set of preset categories (11 vs Gmail’s 3) OR that we also have the amazing Unsubscribe Folder that removes you from email lists in one move OR even how you can customize your category folders OR even EVEN the fact that we send you a very handy Daily Digest everyday telling you what these filed emails are,  I thought I would just show some of the responses we found about the new Gmail feature!

Right away we started seeing peeps tweetin bout it-

Tara at email giant Constant Contact wrote this great post about her experience with both Organizer and Smart Labels.

She comments – “Organizer works how I think the Gmail Labs folks hoped the Smart Labels would.” +1, Tara!

What do you think? Who wears it better? Organizer or Smart Labels? Try em both out… give us the scoop! Facebook, Twitter, or help@otherinbox.com. Shoot us a message, we’ll find it in the cloud!