TC50 Email Solutions

As I wade through the backlog of emails that accumulated during last week's frenzy, I thought I'd take a minute to reflect on some of the email solutions we saw at TechCrunch.

OtherInbox is a neat little site designed to solve your "accessory" email problem. That is, all those newsletters, updates, and alerts that you don't read everyday -- and maybe don't even have in your main inbox. It's a destination site designed to house and organize all that mail. It allows you to create unique email addresses and then categorizes mail based on those addresses to help you break your less-important email intake into a more digestible format. I get my own domain name -- nellwyn.otherinbox.com -- and I can add different prefixes to to create addresses. For example, I can change my Gilt & ShopBop contacts to shop@nellwyn.otherinbox.com and my Facebook & LinkedIn contacts to socialnet@nellwyn.otherinbox.com. The interface -- clean and intuitive -- then sorts and categorizes incoming mail based on address, so my shopping mail goes into one folder and my social networking goes into another.

I'm a big fan of Gmail's + trick, so this is right up my alley. The most appealing feature is that you can see what mailing lists are responsible for unwanted mail. If I sign up to Joe's Event List with joes@nellwyn.otherinbox.com and find that I'm getting 10 emails a day from Joe's affiliates, I can block that one email address and eliminate all the unwanted mail. As Evan, who met a couple of the OI devs at Lone Star Ruby, said, "Props to OtherInbox for doing something that's already been done, email, and making it better."

NutshellMail provides a different take on the issue of the ever-increasing partitioning of inboxes. Nutshell, a web-based service, aggregates mail from your various messaging accounts -- whether it be that personal Hotmail account, Facebook, or your "accessory" Gmail account -- and delivers the mail to a main account of your choosing on a schedule of your choosing in a streamlined update email. Not only does this allow you to check all your email in one place, it also allows you to see messages from sites that might not be accessible from your workplace. While OtherInbox creates a separate, very well-organized, home for your less-important email, Nutshell brings that email to your main account in a systematized way. Both seem like creative solutions to an old, pesky problem.

Postbox tackles another problem: The photos, links and docs that get lost in your inbox. It's a desktop email application that offers advanced labeling and searching functionality, allowing you to more easily find and share everything -- not just the text -- that's in your inbox. I was really impressed by the demo and the team behind it, including Scott MacGregor, one of the original developers of Thunderbird. It looks to me like it's a better email application, and I couldn't be more thrilled: I think I've outgrown the Gmail interface. I can't wait to download Postbox and start trying it out.



That's all for now -- I've avoided my inbox for long enough today.

Happy emailing,
Nell