“Capture” is the word commonly used to convey this approach to marketing. It’s as if we’re holding the e-mail address hostage. – Says Eric Groves of Constant Contact

So what do you do when you no longer want your email address held hostage?

At OtherInbox, we think you should be able to quickly and easily set your email free! That’s why we created the Unsubscribe Folder in Organizer and its new, stand alone cousin, Unsubscriber.

The stand alone Unsubscriber app is currently just for Yahoo! Mail users (if you use Gmail or AOL, Organizer already has it built in!) and it’s the easiest way to remove your email address from a mailing list. Period.

To install, simply click on the Unsubscriber link in the lower left hand side of your Yahoo Mail application list. Then click “Create my Unsubscribe Folder” to create a new folder called, what else, Unsubscribe.

Move or “Drag and drop” the offending email into your Unsubscribe folder and we’ll get right to work on removing you from that sender’s mailing list. You’ll also notice that we will place any subsequent messages from that sender in the “Unsubscribe” folder UNTIL we can get you removed. Eventually, they’ll just stop.

So go ahead, try it on. Don’t have Yahoo! Mail? It’s in Organizer for Gmail and AOL too!

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! =)

See below to see if you fall into the Socialite profile! Then enter our 1 Million Signups iPad 2 giveaway! How’s that for a celebration?

The Urban Dictionary defines Socialite as ”Those who talk to erybody at a party and go out of their way to make sure they talk to ERYBODY!”

Sound familiar? Well, have you ever thought to yourself…

“I get a lot of friend requests and invites that I am always checking my email to see what, when and who are new.”

So many friends, so little bandwidth. Socialites are always juggling event invites, updates and friend requests. Eventbright, Facebook, Evite, Twitter and other notifications rule their world and it can be quite the handful staying on top of it all! It’s like the internet is a one big networking party!

Socialites! We say. Bring. It. On. Just use Organizer!

One look at your Daily Digest and Socialites can see where they are going and who might be joining them! It’s almost like having a personal assistant filling you in on your busy life every morning! Except this assistant doesn’t need food.. or money.

So keep on networking Socialites. We got your inbox covered so you won’t miss a person, place or event!

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! =)

See below to see if you have any of the Hoarder characteristics. Then enter our 1 Million Signups iPad 2 giveaway, running all through the month of June!

How many emails are in your inbox? How old is the oldest one? While aimlessly moving an email from one folder to another, have you ever thought to yourself?

“I just know I am going to need this email someday!”

Oops! You might be a Hoarder!

Talk about email overload! Newsletters, receipts, even past delivery notices… Hoarders just KNOW they are going to need some information in their email so they are unable to delete or archive anything and end up with a huge amount of mail in their inboxes.

The thing is, WE don’t think it’s a problem!

At least, not with Organizer! Organizer helps make sense of the melee, placing things right where they need to be. It’s the email you want, when you need it!

Our Organizer is perfect for a hoarder since it automatically organizes incoming marketing messages. Think of Organizer as a curator of sorts–Placing things in nice little folders for you and giving you a daily inventory via the Daily Digest!

View more videos at: http://nbcmiami.com.

So if you’re a Hoarder, stand up tall and don’t let people bring you down. It’s your email, do what you want with it! We can help you reduce the clutter and keep your emails from real people in a cozy little spot, your inbox!

So what is the oldest email you have? What kind of Hoarding tales have you got? Chime in on Twitter or Facebook! Play along 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!

So, while moms are totally worth FULL retail, sites such as Groupon, Living Social, Buy With Me and many, many others can help stretch your dollar. Now, Organizer is helping to bring the best deals right up top, front and center in your Daily Digest!

NOTE- Your mom might like Quizno’s but try just a bit harder…

If you are new here, every day OIB makes sure our Organizer users are kept up to date with their email inbox via our very helpful Daily Digest! These lucky-smart people use the Digest everyday to check in with their less than important messages; hacking their own email to do what they want to better fit their lifestyle.

Late last year, we started including ads within the digest and were glad to see people clicking on them, finding the things they needed and wanted!

Now, we are excited to offer some of the very best deals online via our “promoted offers”! Promoted offers will be set up right on top (as a coupon) and have a discrete “promoted” label so you know they were brought to you by us here at OtherInbox HQ.

How do we choose the promoted offers? We simply curate the BEST we can find on the web. A daily deal, a one time offer, the buy-one-get-one-frees of the web you always hear about but can never seem to get in on. If it is blowing up on twitter, facebook deals, a group buying site or even a big box, brick-n-mortar we will corral it and serve it to you via your Daily Digest!

With Organizer, you get a more manageable inbox AND you save money?! Now, won’t Mom be proud? =)

First off, the ATX Startup Crawl on Thursday, March 10th then Ignite SXSW on Friday, March 11th.

But two back to back events were not enough for us to be involved in though!

Our own Joshua Baer also had a solo panel on Saturday, the 12th. Joshua’s “5 Secrets to a Killer Elevator Speech” was, again, a huge hit.

Finally, later in the week, Joshua goes on to win the 2011 Das Iron Geek Award!? Believe it, we completely crushed it during SX!

THE ATX STARTUP CRAWL

We hit the ground running with the ATX Startup Crawl on Thursday the 10th, the day before SXSW actually started. With the Startup Crawl, we participated in a technology open house of sorts where ourselves and more than twenty other local Austin Technology Startups opened our office doors and invited folks in to have a beer, talk to recruiters and just get to know us.

Overall, Startup Crawl was all about selling Austin Technology to both locals and the people coming to SXSW. Working as a cohesive community, we were able to present a really strong presence for all of us by opening up our own creative spaces and smartly utilizing our existing resources.

Startup Crawl was a blast and even garnered some national and international press mentions and backlinks.

The very next night OtherInbox was proud to be a major sponsor of Ignite SXSW, an official SXSW event. We paired with Dorkbot and put on an amazing show that included both the Ignite format mini-presentations from such speakers as Guy Kawasaki and Bob Metcalfe PLUS the maker faire type science displays of Dorkbot!

We brought the brains, they brought the bots and we ended it with a great performance by Arc Attack’s singing Tesla Coils!

FIVE SECRETS TO A KILLER ELEVATOR PITCH

The very next day, our dude Joshua Baer took a packed house at SXSW Interactive, walked them through his 5 secrets of a killer elevator pitch and then had them come up and take a turn. The response was pretty great!

Here’s the deck from Joshua’s presentation. Elevate your elevator pitch to “killer!”

5 Secrets to a Killer Elevator Pitch – SXSW 2011

See more examples at http://killerelevator.com

Das Iron Geek

On paper, the 2nd annual Das Iron Geek competition might look like an aborted scene from an aborted “Revenge of the Nerds” sequel but it is actually a series of fun and geeky challenges by keyboard manufacturer Das Keyboard to find and crown the “geekiest influencer at SXSW.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the geekiest influencer is our very own Joshua Baer! The above “Office” inspired trophy can now be found in our office and is a source of great pride to us all! I am unable to disclose the horrible things my boss had to do to be crowned with such a geektastic honor, so instead I will direct you to this amazing video.

Note- It is long but pretty awesome.

Check out J. Baer’s touching acceptance speech at the 08:38 mark!

The aftermath of our SXSW Interactive 2011? A bunch of business cards, a natural aversion to free beer and BBQ, a slight suntan, a pair of bulked up calves from biking around town and a huge appreciation for our hometown, Austin Texas. Were you here? Tell us about it!

Twitter – Facebook- Email – We are so connected it hurts!

Marketers, developers, business and casual email users all have different reasons to attend an event like Inbox Love. Marketers may need better ideas on how to improve their email deliverable rates, gaining new customers and overall strategy. Developers, like the OIB team, are constantly looking to learn about the latest platforms and program and application solutions to make their products work better.

All of your major email players are there. Email service providers (ESP’s) like Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, Aol are all representing as well as ancillary services and add-ons such as Constant Contact, Rapleaf, Mailchimp and Rackspace and many, many more. Even Facebook is there… talking email. All day.

Why? Because despite all the hub-bub, email is still very much the best way to reach your customer base cheaply and efficiently and is only second to search marketing as far as online marketing tactics go. Additionally, it’s easy to track and adds an element of loyalty in the opt-in process that you simply don’t get with search!

Also, as a copywriter, I personally find the whole art of effective subject lines incredibly fascinating. I mean why do certain things work while others don’t? Writing a great subject line is similar to writing a great tweet or SMS and there is art in what makes people… “click.”

Earlier today, Josh Baer talked about expiring email. Expiring email that can self delete based on when its usefulness is past (like coupons or special offers) could be huge in reducing clutter in our inboxes while making marketing messages more likely to get converted into sales or leads.

Sounds like the talk went well. Jordan tweeted about it HERE!

Jordan reports that Josh mentions how senders are likely to adopt expiring emails because overall we all want things to be better! I agree. It’s just good sense to not annoy your customer.  Add the fact that it will save users time and effort and it’s a no-brainer!

We even made a new friend it seems in @AmyHiggins! See? Proof that conferences can move the needle!

What else would you want your email to do? Shouldn’t coupons tell you when you are about to miss out on a deal? Tell us below, check us on Facebook, tweet about it on Twitter, or send us an email to help@otherinbox.com. Hurry back OIB team, before I drink all this beer…

New technologies like HTML5 (makes auto-play video in the email client a reality), geo-location, social media integration and smart apps like our own product Organizer means we are all constantly pushing that digital envelop to make email smarter, more intuitive and, well, just more awesome overall.

Like I said, ideas hit the whiteboard fast here at OIB and some of the features mentioned in the article have been up there in blue and black, waiting for their turn at your inbox through Organizer. For example, the article talks about expiring emails. That’s on the OIB whiteboard. A time sensitive message or offer should self-delete when the offer is expired or no longer relevant, right? And the Daily Digest should be able to help you keep track of it all! Cool huh?

So it’s no wonder Joshua is at ECC in Miami with other direct marketing trendsetters this week discussing the evolution of email. He knows email, period. Seriously, sitting in strategy meetings and business development calls with him requires a quick pen for notes and action items. He keeps us moving quickly to build the best product we possibly can and often times the office feels like Frankenstein’s laboratory as we coax new code into doing that cool new thing we want it to do!

In the BtoB article, Joshua says, “The real value of these new features is getting people to interact with email as if they’re directly on a Web page.” And he should know, because here at OtherInbox he is leading us in that direction all the time, piece by piece, building the next big thing in email!

What else should your email do? Tell us below, ping us on Facebook, tweet about it on Twitter or send us an old fashioned email at help@otherinbox.com.

It’s easier to be successful if you start off organized. So why not do a little housekeeping to ensure you are managing your online life the best that you can. You might even find yourself a little more breathing room in your social media feeds and email inbox!

Online Profiles-
Your online profiles include all your social media accounts. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gowalla, Foursquare, Quora and more all create this composite image of a certain part of who you are… At least online anyhow.

This week is a fantastic time to go through all your online personae and clean house-

• Never use that My Space account? Last update circa 2007? Get rid of it. Your friends likely already have.

• Always bothered by event invites on Facebook? Change your settings or block the repeat offenders.

• Do you have accounts with Gowalla or Foursquare but checked in once? Try it again. (We love it!)

• Confused about Quora? Get to know the knowledge depot site and decide for yourself. (We love this site too)

TIP- Now is also a great time to go through your Facebook and Twitter friends and followers and do a little weeding out too. Why deal with noise when all you want is signal?

You’ll be glad you did-  Recently, I removed about 200 people I was following on Twitter when it became clear they were either not adding much to the conversation or changed topics or stopped using Twitter or whatever the case might have been. My feed was instantly more relevant and useful since I had trimmed the fat-  so to speak. (Never mind the 5 extra lb’s from the recent holiday smackdown.)

That Pesky Inbox-
Last week, we covered using Organizer as your very own “personal assistant” in the ongoing battle to maintain your inbox. Using Organizer’s Unsubscribe Folder you can finally get rid of those emails you no longer need to receive.

i.e.- Your ferret ran away. Why are you still receiving monthly “Ferrets Rock: A group devoted to Ferrets” updates?

The amazing Unsubscribe Folder and the automatic sorting found in Organizer are great tools in reducing information overload.

It’s easy to get a handle on the clutter in your inbox with a diligent assistant such as Organizer.  (Hope your ferret slinks his way home!)

Online Privacy-

Finally, the mother of all online concerns; Privacy.

Take a step back and look at what information is out there. Be appalled.

Relax! When you think about it, we share a lot of personal info on our social profiles but it’s fine as long you take care in what you share and how you share it.

First, prioritize your involvement in all of your social media accounts and make adjustments accordingly.

For example, LinkedIn can be more important when you are actively seeking a new gig so you might make sure that your LinkedIn account is more dynamic and constantly updated.

Second, adjust your privacy settings in Facebook. If you followed our advice above and weeded out your contacts, you’ll be ahead of the curve. There are many different ways to filter what both your friends and others can see.

TIP- Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are not popularity contests! Try to make real and meaningful connections with people and entities you either know personally, are proud to patronize or share interests with.

Third, a very simple rule. If you do not want your grandmother (or boss) to see it. Don’t put it on Facebook.

These are just a few tips to help you think about a renewed and refreshed online persona for 2011.

What are some of your favorite online persona tips? Chime in below, email us at help@otherinbox.com, ping us at @OtherInbox on twitter or friend up on Facebook.

Wow! What a crazy month this has been. This December has been chock-full of holiday spirit here at our Austin, Texas office! In between writing better code for Organizer, vetting new projects and opportunities and much, much more… We have made sure to take the time to celebrate one another and our collective successes!

First up- Our company holiday party was a ton of fun and we all took the time to sit together for some great pictures.

Left to right- Dave Wilby, VP Product Management | Ian Ragsdale, Project Manager | Hoon Park, Customer Advocate | Joshua Baer, Founder and CEO | Luca Siciliano, Marketing Analyst | John Rodriguez (J-Ro), Marketing/PR | Ben Hamill, Developer

We were joined for this awesome group photo by our sister web development company Capital Thought and some of our friends and family!

Left to right- Sarah Park and her and Hoon’s baby girl | … oh forget it!

Also, we think Josh might have missed his calling as a glam rocker!

Next- A week or so later we hosted a very special private screening of the new Tron Legacy Film at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. About 100 friends, press, investors, partners and more joined us for an afternoon matinee of the holiday blockbuster! Tron!

Before the film, we quickly shared with our audience just how great 2010 had been for us and some of the things to come in 2011.

What were some of those things you ask? =)

• -We’ve gained over half a million users!
• -Our Unsubscribe Folder is is a hit! The easiest and fastest way to get off an email list.
• -We made our first advertising revenue! That’s huge for a startup…
• -The iPhone app is coming! Spring 2011. A different way to access things on your email…

You can see all the photos from our Tron Screening and afterparty here.

That’s about it for now. I need to check in with Mr. Spam. We sent him to the North Pole on a special assignment. I need to ping him and see how he is faring with Santa’s crazy inbox. Last I heard, he was filtering millions of emails from kids sending in last minute requests…. also, we are helping him handle a GROWING number of shipping notices.

Yes, Virginia, Santa outsources some of his “gift deployment” duties. (Not everyone has a chimney ya know!)

We hope you have a great holiday and a happy new year too! Peace and love to all from the gang at OtherInbox!