A Blast from the Past: Return Path Acquires OtherInBox
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.