Google recently announced a new Gmail platform called Gmail Contextual gadgets. These useful gadgets expand Gmail functions and allow developers like OtherInbox to build web gadgets that display alongside your email messages.

They are triggered by contextual clues, such as the contents of subject lines, sender and recipient email addresses, etc. These apps give users the ability to interact with the data conveniently within their Gmail account.

We have been busy brainstorming and are considering building a gadget that would display the profile & reviews of the Sender of the email you are reading. For example, you receive an email from Best Buy. The gadget would provide information about Best Buy, such as the number of emails and coupons they typically send, reviews and which of your Facebook friends also get email from Best Buy. Like our Sender review pages.

In addition, if you were already using Organizer, you could choose how you want Best Buy emails organized, and any easy way to unsubscribe from Best Buy’s newsletters.  All of this could be done without leaving Gmail. Sound interesting?

The possibilities are endless. What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions on what you would like to see in a Gmail gadget? We would love to hear from you.

This morning on my way to work, I was listening to NPR.  A segment came on air about the recent rise in spam due to the mortgage crisis.  With many people worried about losing their homes and desperate to provide for their families, spammers are taking advantage of this time to steal your identity AND your money.  Right now, spammers are targeting this group of people to send them messages about mortgage protection packages and other scams that are designed to sound as legit as possible and to make people think it is a way of protection.

 Most of us read this and think, “Well, I would never fall for that.”  The problem is that we all know someone who might.  OtherInbox’s primary focus is to help you control email overload.  We do have other cool features like on the fly emails, blocking spam, and identifying who is selling or leaking your email address, but our main OIB users tend to be more technical in nature.  Our premium model and our feature roadmap focus on these more technical people and their needs. However, OIB’s simplicity and ease of use make it an ideal way for the people in our lives who are not as “tech savvy” to protect themselves from situations like the scam above. 

If you know someone who needs this protection, tell them about OtherInbox, and show them how to make special email addresses for things they sign up for and how easy it is to identify spam in these customized mailboxes. Feel free to share your funny spam headlines and stories with @mrspam on twitter!

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.

During this economy downturn, all of us have been affected in one way or another. Stores are closing, unemployment rates are soaring, and the stock market is dropping fast. Through these rough times, we would like to provide you with some helpful tips for using your OtherInbox.

Job Search

Looking for a job? There are several ways your OtherInbox can help your job search.

Since knowledge is essential in getting ahead within an industry, you can become an industry expert by signing up for blogs, newsletters, and news reports. Send them all to your OtherInbox.

More importantly, you can also sign up for the blogs of the companies you are seeking employment with. If an opportunity for an interview arises, gaining insight about the industry and company is crucial. The organized mailboxes OtherInbox provides allow you to find that information quickly.

You can also use your OtherInbox to sign up at job sites such as craigslist, Monster, LinkedIn, and every other possible job site out there. Not only does this give you organized mailboxes to read
through and pick the right job, but it also clears your real inbox. Never miss out on someone trying to reach you for an interview!

Starting Your Own Business

Ready to start your own company? Looking to make some extra cash with a current hobby? OtherInbox will be your personal assistant.

For example, if you are selling paintings online, you usually post your email address as a point of contact. However, who wants to expose their personal email address to strangers? This is where OtherInbox steps in.

Post your OtherInbox email address instead: Buy my painting[at]yourname.oib.com. Use OtherInbox to sell a car, advertise on craigslist, or for any other situation you can think of!

Shopping Online

When every dollar counts, don’t you want to get the best deals out there? With OtherInbox, you can sign up for newsletters from all your favorite online stores.

You can receive exclusive coupons, notifications of special sales events, and more, right to an organized mailbox. Those emails are a nightmare when they are piling up in your real inbox. With OtherInbox, read them only when you need them.

If you are looking to buy a coffee maker or a new home, OtherInbox can help you save and compare to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck. You can also sign up for online consumer reviews right to your OtherInbox, so you can make sure you are getting quality product at a great deal.

OtherInbox cares about our community of users and hopes that you will find ways to use your OtherInbox to make life a little easier.  If you have an idea or would like to share an interesting way in which you use your OIB, please comment below.

Using your OtherInbox to subscribe to your favorite stores can save you BIG money during the holidays. I recently signed up for all of my favorite stores using my storename[at]lchaney.otherinbox.com account and have already received a ton of coupons and even *free* stuff that I can use to lighten the financial strain the holidays bring us. Before you had your OtherInbox, subscribing to email lists meant email overload in your personal email account. Not only would you miss out on cool coupons and free stuff, your personal email was buried under all of this junk and was often overlooked.

Here is what you do

Go to all of your favorite stores and the stores that your family and friends love, and sign up for their email blasts using your OtherInbox. You can also sign up for eflyers, RSS feeds, and anything else they may offer. The emails will autofilter into mailboxes where you can check back and skim through for hidden treasure!

Try it out and send your savings stories to *savings[at]lchaney.otherinbox.com*.

Here is an example: I went to www.bathandbodyworks.com, scrolled down to the “Sign Up for Email” box, and entered bbw[at]lchaney.otherinbox.com. A few minutes later I had an awesome surprise!

Happy Holidays!

Congratulations to the top 20 OtherInbox users! Besides Mike and I, these users have given out the most OtherInbox addresses and have received the most email. There are a lot of my friends and family on there who have been using OtherInbox for about a year, but there are a handful of newcomers as well!

1. Ivor Clarke
2. Cyan Banister
3. Amy Baer
4. Ryan Pitylak
5. John Engler
6. Bijoy Goswami
7. Evan Alter
8. Aaron Scruggs
9. Joleen Sanborn
10. Rand Wacker
11. Bobby Potter
12. Ben Humphry
13. Ross Miller
14. Bradley Dean
15. Jesse Brede
16. Chris Hyams
17. Brandon Phillips
18. Arthur Meyerovich
19. Erica Tello
20. Matt Buck

Everyone on this list has given out more than 100 OtherInbox addresses!

P.S. Bjorn, Mason and Neelan — you are so close!

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.

To risk carrying the analogy too far, we can think about email as falling into three major categories of pork.

We’re all pretty familiar with spam email. It’s the stuff that we don’t want.

Spam usually works hard to try and look like ham, the stuff we really do want.

And then then is bacn, the stuff that we think we want, but not right now.

I’ve got email overload. I try to do the Inbox Zero thing but I just can’t make it happen. A few times a year I can knock it down to zero and then within a month I’m back at a few thousand messages in my inbox.

Part of the problem is that I just keep signing up for more emails! I’m not talking about Spam, I’m talking about emails that I sign up, thinking that I want them at the time. But then when the emails arrive, I realize that either 1) I don’t really have time read the messages even though I thought I wanted them or 2) there are more emails than I expected and they aren’t relevant to me.

I buy a lot of things online. In fact, if I can buy it online, I probably do. I get better prices, can read reviews, and get it shipped to my door because I’m too busy to drive out and pick it up. It seems like every month I’m able to buy something online that I had to buy offline before. As a result, I get more confirmation emails, shipping notices, and all of the other newsletters and promotions that follow afterward. MORE EMAIL.

I get most of my news online. I don’t read the paper. I don’t watch the news on TV. I get Google Alerts. I subscribe to RSS feeds. I sign up for email newsletters. I get breaking news from CNN and traffic alerts from my local TV station. I’m always finding new email lists I can sign up for to get news about specific topics or special alerts. MORE EMAIL.

One of the things I love about the Apple retail store is that when I walk into the store and make a purchase they always offer to email me the receipt instead of printing it out. I wish every store would do that! I don’t want to carry around a paper receipt and then have to do something with it later. In the process, Apple collects email addresses to build their marketing lists. I think we’ll see other companies doing this in the future. MORE EMAIL.

Cars even send email now! If you have the OnStar system installed in your car, it sends email alerts when the car needs service or if the air in the tires is low. It won’t be long before your refrigerator sends you email when your milk is sour, your washing machine sends you email when it needs service, your shoes send you email when the sole is wearing thin, etc. MORE EMAIL.

It’s just going to get worse! And notice that I’m not talking about spam or phishing emails. All the examples listed above are things that (you think) you want. We aren’t good at deciding if we want something at the time when we sign up. We don’t know if we really have time read it until after we get it. We think we want all this stuff, but we don’t want to spend our whole day reading email.

We need a tool like OtherInbox to help cut through the clutter. It needs to start with the assumption that we’re NOT going to read every single message. It needs to allow us to find the important messages without reviewing every message in chronological order. It needs to be smart about automatically recognizing emails I don’t need to see and filing the away for me.

Sign up for the beta and try it out!

I get a lot of spam. I get too much email. But even if you took out all the spam, I still get too much email.

As far as email is concerned, my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Like that person at the buffet who puts more food on their plate than they could ever possibly eat, I sign up for more email than I could ever possibly read.

I just can’t help it. I keep signing up for more stuff. I’ve been on the Internet for about 15 years and I already receive hundreds of emails per day. I would think that over time, the amount of email will only increase because I will have done more and more things that put my various email addresses on lists. In the course of living my life I get added to new email lists every day.

Every week, you can buy something over the Internet that you had to buy in a store the week before. Every day, I sign up for some newsletter or beta program or other thing on the Internet that needs to validate me by sending a confirmation email.

Nothing is taking me off of email lists. I manually remove myself occasionally, but nothing to compare to the rate at which I sign up for new things.

I already get more email than I can possibly read. I miss important emails because there is so much that I can’t keep up with it. Once something falls off the first screen of my Inbox I won’t ever see it again unless I specifically go looking for it.

Yet I keep signing up. Send me some more email, please. Thank you, sir. May I have another?