OtherInbox's dirty little secret: It comes with free bacn
OtherInbox helps you fight bacn and spam at the same time, but ends up sending you bacn of its own. Oops.
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.
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.