Earlier this year, we introduced a change to the way Organizer labels emails in Gmail accounts. Instead of using a single “OtherInbox” label, Gmail Organizer now uses new OIB labels that help categorize emails as they are organized.

Based on the feedback we received, the majority of our users liked these new labels. However, some missed the ability to select a single label or folder in Gmail to view all organized emails at once.

We listened and have added a new “OIB” label for all organized emails. Because Gmail allows multiple labels, every organized email now has its category label and the OIB label. The benefit is you can now see your organized emails by category or all at once.

Nested labels

When you combine this “OIB” label with Gmail’s Nested Labels (a Gmail lab), the result is nested labels right inside of Gmail that can be collapsed and expanded. This is a great way to keep your labels nice and neat. We recommend that you give it a try. Just follow these instructions to turn it on:

• In Gmail, go to Settings, then Labs (or click the green flask icon next to Settings)
• Find the lab Nested Labels and click Enable
• Scroll to the top or bottom of the list and click Save Changes

Previously on this blog, Joshua Baer asked our Gmail Organizer users for their feedback. Organized messages are currently labeled with just one OtherInbox label. Josh suggested an alternative: multiple OIB labels like those in our Yahoo! Mail Organizer product. We wanted to know which you thought was better.

Based on your feedback from the blog, on our support site, and via emails from our users, the answer was clear. We will be introducing multiple OIB labels for Gmail Organizer on Monday, May 17. We think our Gmail Organizer users will enjoy having their messages categorized with these new labels as much as our Yahoo! Mail Organizer users do.

Too many labels? You can hide them!

With the new OIB labels, the list of labels in Gmail may become a bit lengthy. You can control this by going to Settings, then Labels, to choose which labels you want to see when Gmail loads. Clicking hide next to any label will hide it from the default view. This is a great way to highlight your most important labels so they stand out when you open Gmail.

Nested labels

You may have noticed a different naming scheme for OIB labels. Instead of OIB Shopping, like one of the folders in Yahoo! Mail Organizer, the Gmail version has a slash — OIB/Shopping. Why did we do this? So OIB labels will nest over IMAP.

If you read your Gmail messages over IMAP, OIB labels will group together under a parent folder named OIB. Depending on your email client, you may be able to collapse and expand this folder. This helps keep the folder list in your client organized and tidy.

Don't use IMAP? There is a Gmail Labs feature to show nested folders in the web version of Gmail as well! Just follow these instructions to turn it on:

• In Gmail, go to Settings, then Labs (or click the green flask icon next to Settings)
• Find the lab Nested Labels and click Enable
• Scroll to the top or bottom of the list and click Save Changes
• Go to Settings, then Labels
• Find the blank for creating a new label and create one called OIB

The result is nested labels that can be collapsed and expanded right inside of Gmail!

We really hope our Gmail Organizer users love using these new labels as much as our Yahoo! Mail Organizer users do. Combining OIB labels with some of the advanced features in Gmail make for a great way to keep your Inbox organized, automatically! To connect OtherInbox to your Gmail account, sign up with your Gmail account today!

How many usernames do you think that you have today? It seems every web application out there has yet another username to remember. Sometimes, you can grab your usual username if you're early enough. However, if you're too late, you have a decision to make:

I want hoonpark, but it's not available. Do I change it to hoonpark1? hoon_park? Something completely different like AZNbieberFAN? Will I even remember that?

With this frustration in mind, we are looking at multiple ways to address it. The first we have implemented is a new login feature for our Organizer product. Since Organizer is connected to a user's existing email account, it makes sense to allow users to log in with their email address.

All Organizer users can now log in using their email address. For example, if you installed Automatic Organizer for Yahoo! Mail, just use your Yahoo! Mail address to log in.

Please note, your password for OIB is not necessary the same as your email account's password. If you do not know your password, check our support site for instructions for our Yahoo! Mail and Gmail users.

Google recently launched their Applications Marketplace, "an app store integrated within Google Apps that allows third-party developers the ability to sell software directly to Google’s business consumers". 

What does this mean for you? Instead of browsing the web, spending countless hours on finding the best application to suit your needs, Google Apps Marketplace provides the solution: a one-stop shop for innovative applications, like OtherInbox. Ultimately, this makes your life easier, utilizes your time more efficiently, and maximizes your use of google applications. 

It should come as no surprise that OtherInbox is part of this exciting forum, check out our Google Apps Marketplace profile!  

Now we need your help. If you're already one of our users, please add your voice by writing a review sharing your experiences on how much you love OtherInbox.

Thanks to some enthusiastic users, we already have some great reviews. Check out this one from dalehugo:

Otherinbox saved my Gmail inbox
"Gmail does great in filtering spam. However, I subscribe to a lot of bacon. Some I just need, but it is not urgent. My inbox, usually read from a Blackberry, was bloated. Otherinbox has restored sanity to my mail and harmony to the universe (ok, I made that last part up!). Honest, it is worth looking at and well worth the cost if you average over 50 emails a day. Great product, great service, all from the great state of Texas!"

So if you use OtherInbox with your Gmail account, we encourage you to share your opinion and write a review within the Google Apps Marketplace. Whether it be short and sweet, or long and passionate, we'd love to hear from you! 

Yesterday, Gmail announced a new notification when it detects suspicious login activity for a Gmail account. For example, if a Gmail account was accessed in Austin, TX and then only a few minutes later in Europe, that might trigger this notification to let you know something suspicious may be occurring.

Unfortunately, this can result in some false alarms for OtherInbox users who connect OIB to their Gmail accounts. To find the account activity log in Gmail, find the Details link at the very bottom of the page.

Organizer for Gmail automatically scans and organizes incoming messages into a Gmail account's Inbox, looking for messages that aren't from real people (like newsletters, coupons, receipts, alerts, and so on). These scans connect to this Gmail account periodically throughout the day.

Because our services are hosted entirely in the cloud (specifically, Amazon Web Services), our connections to Gmail accounts come from multiple servers across the United States. These connections will appear in the activity log as IMAP connections.

Below, this Gmail account is normally accessed in Texas, but an IMAP connection was made from New York. This IMAP connection is actually OtherInbox, doing a scan to look for any messages that need to be organized.

If you wish to disable these warnings, you can do so using the "change" link underneath the log. Going forward, we are investigating solutions to minimize and eliminate these warnings for our Organizer users.

Along with much of the internet community, we were highly anticipating Google's new social sharing tool, Google Buzz. Because Buzz is highly integrated into Gmail, we began to think about how OtherInbox should work with Buzz updates.

Currently, pointing OtherInbox at your Gmail account means automatically labeling and archiving all of your messages that aren't from real people (newsletters, coupons, receipts, confirmations, and alerts). This includes notifications from various social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

When we started using Buzz, we noticed there are a few actions that result in a lot more email. For example if anyone replies or likes one of your updates, you get a notification in your Inbox. In addition, if you reply or like someone else's update, future replies also result in another email. More Buzz activity leads to even more notification emails!

Pretty soon, our Gmail Inbox became overwhelmed with Buzz notifications. As one of our developers said, it is going to be difficult to maintain "Buzz Zero" as it grows.

The question is "How would you like OtherInbox to handle these new notifications?"

We could easily add the labeling and archiving of Buzz notifications that reach your Inbox, just like all the other messages we organize. This way, you could get a Digest that lists all of your Buzz notifications from the previous day. But is that what you want?

Now is your chance to tell us what would work for you. Please leave your comments and ideas below so we can better shape OtherInbox for Gmail.

When we connect OtherInbox to a Gmail account, we automatically find messages that aren't from real people and organize them inside of your Gmail account by labeling them OtherInbox and removing them from the Inbox by Archiving them. We synchronize the messages with your OtherInbox account and send you a daily digest so you don't miss anything important. 

Gmail makes a pretty good “other inbox”. Every Gmail account supports “plus addressing”, which means you can create unique email addresses for your Gmail account by adding “+blah” to the end of your email address. For example, if my email address was jbaer1975@gmail.com, I could give Amazon jbaer1975+amazon@gmail.com and give Facebook jbaer1975+facebook@gmail.com.

This helps with spam, because if you want to know why you are receiving an individual message you can “Show Details” to see the To address that the message was sent to. Then if you want to stop that sender, you can create a filter to delete them automatically. For now we’ll just ignore the fact that many websites won’t allow you to sign up with a “+” in your email address. In fact, even Google Alerts won’t let you use a plus when you sign up!

Unfortunately, you won’t notice most of the interesting things you would see with OtherInbox because messages aren’t automatically grouped by the address that they come to. And you still need to look at messages one at a time or do custom searches to group them.

Even if I give out different email addresses, I still end up with this unmanageable list:

Giving out different email addresses to every website is a great foundation for OtherInbox, but there is a lot more to it. OtherInbox displays messages in a unique way that allows you to jump right to the messages you want to read now and ignore the ones that you want to read later. You don’t need to scan through them one-by-one. Without any effort, you instantly know if someone is spamming you and it can be blocked with a single click, rather than having to configure a filter or rule.

Once you give out a bunch of different email addresses with the plus in them, its still a pain in the butt anytime that you want to reply. If you just reply normally, you will expose your real email address. In order to reply and have it come From the correct email address, you need to go through a tedious process of verifying the email address by sending a message to yourself, clicking the link, and then selecting the proper address when you reply. With OtherInbox, this all happens automatically and it always replies from the correct address without you having to set anything up.

So yes, you can use Gmail as your “other inbox”. But chances are, you will still get email overload and that mailbox will still become a big pile of junk. You still need to look through your messages one at a time and don’t have an intelligent way to batch the messages into actionable groups. You might create filters to stop some of the spam, but you probably won’t notice many of the ways your email address gets shared, sold and abused. Anytime you want to reply, you need to go through the verification process and send yourself an email to set up the correct From address.

There is a lot more to OtherInbox than just giving out different email addresses. It’s a great foundation, but it’s just the start. Give OtherInbox a try to see how it can cure your email overload!