Last week, several of our users contacted us complaining about spam in their OtherInbox. Initially, one common complaint was spam being sent to their Seesmic mailbox. It turns out it wasn’t Seesmic’s fault, it was a service provider they were using who got hacked. But, that doesn’t matter to the millions of consumers whose email address is probably in the hands of spammers now.

How did our users know who was spamming them? They provide every site that sends them email with a unique OIB address, like seesmic@yourname.oib.com.

When you use OIB addresses, it’s easy to see who is responsible for the spam you get. And, it’s easy to stop the spam you don’t want. If you gave everyone the same email address, you would have no idea how your email address was obtained by spammers.

We continued to receive more reports of spam. Ultimately, we discovered something else in common – the OIB addresses were given to sites that use an email service provider named AWeber. As it turns out, AWeber’s database got hacked, and their subscribers’ email addresses were accessed.

AWeber’s website claims they manage email marketing for over 65,000 clients. If you signed up for a newsletter from any one of those 65,000+ clients, you could have been spammed.

This is not a dig at AWeber at all. They are a reputable company, with a very strong anti-spam policy, and are known for having good practices. Unfortunately, they got hacked and many email addresses were mined. Even if AWeber fixes all their security issues, their subscribers’ email addresses are already in the hands of spammers. There is no way to take it back, so those subscribers are screwed. I’m sure a lot of them wish they had an OIB account now!

But OtherInbox users are safe. They can just Block the seesmic@yourname.oib.com email address with a single click and change their address with Seesmic to something different, like seesmic1@yourname.oib.com. No more spam!

In the end, bad things can happen to anyone, even the good guys! Protect yourself from spam. Get an OtherInbox account and start using OIB addresses. Leave your Inbox for real people and be fearless with your email!

Over the last few months, OtherInbox has added several cool features,
and I want to make sure you are getting the most out of it.  Whether
you were one of the first beta testers or have just heard about it, there is probably something that will save you time in one of these videos. Click on the ones that are
applicable to you, or watch them all!  We would appreciate it if you
would share these videos with anyone you know who might need a little
help with email overload.

As always, thank you for your support!

(To view videos full size click on each screencast)

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In addition
to keeping you organized and in control of your inbox again, OtherInbox
has many additional perks.  I wanted to share a few of the ways I use
OtherInbox to help me manage my work, hobbies, volunteer activities,
family, shopping, and even vacations.

How OIB helps me with my job

I’ve
had many superusers tell me that OIB has helped them with their
careers.  Several professionals, from hairdressers to leasing agents,
have reported ways that giving on the fly email addresses and having
organized mailboxes have made them more efficient and organized.  As
the Community Manager of OtherInbox, I use on the fly email addresses
to help me with networking, partnership activities, user feedback, and
volunteer organizations that we work with every quarter.  I give each
group their own email address, where they are all nicely organized and
easy to access in one place, my OtherInbox account. 

My own personal encyclopedia of knowledge

I,
like many people, have a lot of things I wish I knew how to do.  Being
a full time employee of an awesome startup and a full time parent does
not give me a lot of extra time to take classes and lessons.  However,
in the last year I have managed to learn how to start my first garden,
enhance my cooking skills, and stay up to date on the newest social
media trends!  How did I find the time to do all that?  I signed up for
the latest newsletters, blogs, and social groups like Ning and had them
all go to my OtherInbox!  It’s like customizing your own virtual
newspaper and reading it when you want to without it EVER overwhelming
your primary inbox.

My pond

Coupons and other money saving tips

We
all love a good bargain but not at the expense of giving out our email
address.  It is not worth overpopulating your inbox with spam and
risking it being sold to other companies.  My absolute favorite part of
having an OtherInbox is the ability to be fearless with my email
address.  I use an on the fly email to sign up for ANYTHING and
EVERYTHING I want.  It has become an obsession.  I sign up for all of
my favorite stores' newsletters, contests, and everything else I can. 
As a result, I get a ton of free stuff.  Free food, free books, and
coupons to all my favorite stores.  I still have not won anything, but
I check my OtherInbox daily to make sure.  It is kind of like playing
the internet lottery - for free!  Now, as you can imagine, I get
spammed all the time, but I don’t stress about it because I have the
power to keep spammers from ever emailing me again with just one
click.  I have also learned who leaks my email address out and will
never spend another dime in their stores or online with them.

All this money saving has made me want a vacation

Although
I have not yet saved thousands with OtherInbox, I still use it to sign
up for travel sites and possible vacation destinations.  My OtherInbox
notifies me of flight deals, discount vacation packages, and much
more.  When it is time to pack up the family and head out of Dodge for
a week or two, I know just where to go to get the most bang for my buck!

What do you do with your OtherInbox?

While
I hope some of this information was helpful, I am always amazed by the
creative ways other people use OIB to their advantage.  Share your
story with us, and email me at myoib[at]peeps.oib.com…oh look, I used it again .

One of my favorite features with OtherInbox is that it allows me to
sign up for EVERYTHING I want to with ease.  Like most people, I love a
good deal, and using OtherInbox proves there IS such a thing as a free
lunch.  Every week, I find amazing deals and coupons for something free
just waiting for me in my organized mailboxes.  I usually share these
finds with friends and family, but I want to do more. 

Some of
our users have shared these amazing finds from their OIB on twitter,
and we do our best to retweet these when they come up.  However, I
think we can do better than that.  I would like to ask you all to join
us in using #OIBFreebie on twitter when you find something cool or free
in your OtherInbox.  Then people can just search for free deals, and we
can share our treasures with each other.

Feel free to share them any day of the week as
well!

Do you have
experience converting Apps?  Are you familiar with OtherInbox? We need
your help! We also want your help with merchant lists, outreach, and
troubleshooting.

Get early access to all our new features, free premium upgrades, and much more!

This month we are looking for help with the following countries:

* India
* Australia
* Brazil
* Mexico
* Taiwan

We are also looking for:

•    UK
•    France
•    Germany
•    Netherlands
•    Etc..
We will be updating many more, so feel free to reach out if your country is not listed yet.

Gracias
Obrigada
Merci
Thank you!

While OIB focuses on helping you control email overload, OIB offers
several other cool things that most of our early beta testers enjoy. 
One of my personal favorites is being able to make up an email address
on the fly when I sign up for something new that I don’t want to go to
my personal email.

For example, while I was at SXSWi, I found a lot of cool prize
giveaways, newsletters, and blogs to sign up for.  Before
OtherInbox, I would have passed on most of these, if not all of them,
for fear of filling up my email.  OtherInbox allows me to be fearless
with my email addresses, so I can sign up for all of the above and
never have it touch my main email.  For every prize giveaway, I signed
up with the address prize@myname.oib.com, and for all the cool companies I signed up with, I used something like opera@myname.oib.com.  When these companies email me, the email goes to
a specialized mailbox under the company name to help me remember who
each email is from. If I win one of those prizes (keep your fingers
crossed), it will show up under my mailbox labeled “prize”.

Another cool thing about creating email addresses on the fly is that
you can use them for networking.  Going back to my SXSWi example, I
gave everybody I met that was interested in partnership opportunities
the email address partnership@myname.oib.com.  Several potential job
candidates came by, and I gave them jobs@myname.oib.com.  It’s not that
I don’t think these people are important enough to go into my “real”
inbox, but this helps me remember where we met and how I can best help
them.  When you are at a conference or other event where you meet
hundreds of people, this is a great tool for remembering and organizing
contacts.

A good friend of mine is an artist who likes to sell paintings in
public places like coffee shops.  In the past, giving out her real
email has been a hassle.  With OtherInbox, not only can she be fearless
in giving out her email to total strangers, but she can use the tricks
above to find out where she is getting the most response from possible
buyers.  She sets up email addresses using the names of the shops where
she is displaying her work to help her track the “hot spots” for her
business.  I have another friend who cuts hair for extra cash while she
is getting back to full-time work.  She gives out one email for
booking@hername.oib.com, one for cancellations@hername.oib.com, and
another for anything else she wants organized.

Another cool thing about creating addresses on the fly is that you can
easily block them if someone is spamming you.  All you have to do is
hit the block button in your OtherInbox.

There are countless ways you can use OtherInbox to control email.  We
love to share unique stories from our users. If you have a story you
would like to share, please send it to myoib@peeps.oib.com.

One last thing, if you ever want a good chuckle, you can watch
someone’s expression when you give your email address as
theirname@yourname.oib.com.  It always raises an eyebrow or two!

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.

As many of you know, we have frozen extending beta test invitations to new users recently. I want to take a moment and explain to you why this is and give you some insight into when you can expect to receive your invite or invitations to give to your friends.

As many of our current beta testers will tell you, OtherInbox has greatly reduced the amount of excess email in their primary inbox, provided them a way to stop unwanted spam, and eliminated the stress of email overload. We want more than anything to continue to do this for everyone on our waiting list and anyone else who has ever dreamed of achieving Inbox Zero.

We pride ourselves on making product the best and most efficient. In order to achieve this, we have temporarily stopped accepting new beta testers to ensure we can improve the signup process, enhance current and new features, and bring to life some of the wonderful suggestions our community of current beta testers have suggested.

It is our goal to work as quickly as possible to allow for more beta testers as soon as possible. We will continue to push ourselves to create the best product and support available to you.

Many of you have asked when you can expect to receive your beta invite or when you can pass out more invites to friends and family. Although we do not have an exact date to share with you, I can say with certainty and sincerity that it is coming soon. We will also be providing special offers and invitations to our community on Twitter, our fans on Facebook, and our patient friends on our waiting list at OIB.com.

Being fearless with my email has shown me how different companies handle their newsletters. There are many areas of improvement needed. For example, do not send a confirmation message that does not state where it is coming from. That seems obvious, right?

Another issue in particular caught my eye today.

I signed up for a newsletter from 4inkjets.com hoping to get a heads up on coupons or great deals on printer ink. I have never heard of the site before, but I have no worries: 4inkjets gets its own OIB email address.

A few days later, I see that my 4inkjets mailbox has a new message. I am in need of some ink, so I take a look. Here’s what I see:

It’s a newsletter about printer ink, but what is LD Products?

It turns out that LD Products has been doing business as 4inkjets.com since 1999 (according to their About Us page). It has been 10 years! How many people have deleted these messages during that time, since they had never heard of the company before?

If I saw it in my regular inbox (and not my OtherInbox), I would have never made the connection. Maybe I would have checked them out. Most likely, I would have marked it as spam and waited for my 4inkjets newsletter that would never come.

It’s a big world out there. I am certain there are other oddities to find.