MainSleaze

This morning a heavy hitter in the legitimate bulk email community, reputation service Return Path, announced that it has acquired OtherInBox, an interesting free webmail provider with some good tools for managing email overload. Return Path plans to use the data that users of OtherInBox generate by their activities to improve its main reputation products and gain more insight into “the user experience” with email.

Despite my respect for Return Path and interest in their activities, I doubt I’d have bothered to comment on this except for an interesting side issue: the founder of OtherInBox is Joshua Baer, a former titan in the spam email business in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I became aware of OtherInBox a few months ago after I stumbled across Baer on Twitter and, wanting to find out what he was up to, went over to the OtherInBox web site.

Whatever I expected, OtherInBox wasn’t it. This free service actually made sense. It’s a set of tools for sorting personal email, work-related email, and (yes) marketing email in separate folders, allowing the user to give each his attention when he was ready to give it. This isn’t a spam filter; it’s a filter for the email you asked to receive, but might not want to look at right now. Its users see the email that they most want to read quickly, without having to wade through other email that isn’t as important to them.

The thing is, spam filters are pretty good these days. Anybody who uses email and has been listening for the last few years, however, has heard repeatedly about email overload caused mostly by the flood of email that the users requested. Email that users requested isn’t spam, but too much lower-priority email — such as marketing announcements and offers for companies and products the user wants — can drown out high-priority personal and business email just as unfiltered spam does. Existing tools for managing email require users to set up their own folders and write scripts to sort incoming email, which works when you get — say — fifty emails a day, but rapidly becomes a pain when you get a few hundred or a few thousand to multiple email accounts. (As I do and many people do.)

Recently Microsoft announced significant changes to its Hotmail free webmail service to address this issue and its causes. Other industry leaders are working on solutions that address email overload as well. After looking through OtherInBox, however, I think it got there first.

While Return Path and Joshua Baer would probably both prefer to leave any issue about his past in the past <G>, I’m honestly delighted to see his unquestionable talent and drive put to use fixing email problems for users instead of causing them. 😉