Sometimes your email can just become full of junk from social networking sites, newsletters & blog updates. For me I needed a way to split my email up – so the items in my “inbox” are only important – Like client’s emails for designs or quotes. I had heard about a service called Otherinbox a few months back but it was still very new and I didn’t feel I was ready to use it in a real world environment. Last week I was watching BBC Switch and they featured Otherinbox at the end of the show and I decided to check it out (again!). Looking at there site it said they only supported gmail – I use my own server’s email, I had to work out a way to get around it and IMAP came to the rescue.

I had to work out a way to get my 2,000+ emails to gmail so I could run them through OtherInbox and get all my old emails sorted. I ended up signing up to gmail then connecting to my account in Mail through IMAP. Once IMAP once running it was as simple as drag and drop! Once all my emails were inside my GMail account i was ready to tell OtherInbox to scan my inbox.

The OtherInbox scanning process is very simple, you fill in one form with your Gmail details and it then analyses your inbox – It does not however make any changes. The processing time varies on the size of your inbox but for me took approx 2 hours. You get sent an email letting you know once the scan is complete. The scan lists all the known sites you have emails for and lets you either Move/Copy or ignore the emails. Once you have let it know what you would like doing OtherInbox then starts to move your emails across – Which unfortunately is a slow process taking 4-5 hours to complete (Depending on the number of emails). I have been told they are looking into improving the migration time.

Once all your emails are nicely split up I told my social networking sites to use my new email address which is as default email@username.otherinbox.com so then any new emails go directly into the correct folder. You can also setup custom folders with no need to make a folder before hand just email newfoldername@username.otherinbox.com and otherinbox creates a nice new folder for you & emails you primary address letting you know – so kind of them

The interface is very easy to use and the design is brilliant. You can tell the interface has been designed to look very much like standard email clients, the layout works great with the left displaying your location, middle displaying which folder your in and then the emails and the email content on the right. The top contains some buttons which are not yet working – implying they are soon to be features – remember its still in beta! There are loads of options you can edit and each mailbox can have individual options. You can also add a custom domain to the system allowing you to have foldername@yourdomain.com – I have used this feature, unfortunately only available for paying customers.

You can check your emails manually, be provided with a daily email which summarizes what emails are unread – You can also read through RSS which gives you the ability to use your favorite RSS client, good eh?

To use Otherinbox as a real-world solution you have to pay for premium as the free version only shows the last 30 days of messages which makes it impracticable to say the least. I have paid the 20 dollars to have a premium account – also enabling the use of IMAP which I have to say is a little disappointing not providing an outgoing smtp server or the ability to drag emails into the mailboxes.

Overall I would say Otherinbox has great potential and for people who get a lot of emails I would say it can save hours a week cleaning out and sorting unwanted emails. Otherinbox still has a long way to go before its reached its full potential if you are however willing to give it a go in beta and prepared to pay for a beta service I would say try it!

Want more Information? Check out Otherinbox’s Homepage or view the Youtube video they provide below.