OtherInbox's dirty little secret: It comes with free bacn

One of the downfalls of conferences where you're scrambling to cover things live is that you don't actually get to test out the products you're writing about. Between the spotty Internet connection and end of day fatigue, one company that I think deserved a little more of a look was OtherInbox, the service that helps you fight both bacn and spam from services you've sign up for.

A day later I've already run into one somewhat serious problem: upon sign-up, it automatically sets you up to receive daily notifications of your in-box status, even if there are no new messages. These go to the e-mail address you gave them when you registered. This means it's actively continuing a problem it set out to solve.

Upon sign-up, OtherInbox automatically opts you in to get daily e-mail updates to the address you gave them, which is a problem the service was designed to stop.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The good news is that you can tweak these notifications to only send you something when you get new messages. There's also a slew of RSS feeds you can subscribe to that will deliver the new messages to your favorite reader for managing there.

My advice to the OtherInbox guys is to practice what you preach and set that notification service to "off" from the start.

That small quibble aside, I'm loving the service. The same general thing can be had with Gmail and some smart filtering management, but it's not nearly as sexy or easy to set up for someone like my mom, who could just keep her special OtherInbox address in a text file on her desktop and use it when needed.

Update: Good news on two fronts: the setting has now been set as opt-in when you sign up instead of automatically setting you up to get messages every day. Also, we've got 100 more invites to give out, so to get yours visit this page.

[joshubaer]

Thanks for the suggestion Josh. We'll update the site today so that it only sends daily notifications when you have new email. I'm glad to hear you like the service!

[joeremote]

Great concept i like what I see so far but where do you provide feedback to this site? The feedback dialog just says coming soon. This site seems like it is still mostly alpha not beta and I don't actually see much of a difference between the alpha site and beta site. I have tried in Firefox, Chrome, & IE . The site loads in Firefox and chrome but still seems pretty buggy in both. IE just keeps asking me to download a file and I can't go any further.