Spam fighting results with OtherInbox

I’ve been using OtherInbox for several months, and thought it was about time to share the results with you. OtherInbox (OIB) is a service that allows you to create email addresses on the fly. These aren’t temporary email addresses that expire after X amount of time like many services. Instead, OtherInbox allows you to continue using these custom email addresses as long as you wish.

Once you sign up for an account with OIB using your real email address you’re ready to go. For example: you want to leave a comment on an article at AppleInsider.com, but in order to do that, you’re required to create an account with your email address – but you’re not sure you really want to do that.

With OIB you simply create a special email address just for AppleInsider. So your newly created email might be [email protected]. You don’t have to set anything up ahead of time, just make up an email address right then and there. It’s helpful to use the name of the site you’re creating it for just to see at a glance who is sending you spam. From that point forward, any email sent to that address will show up in your OIB inbox, categorized under AppleInsider.

OtherInbox categorizes email, making it easy to see who is spamming you

You might be wondering why I chose AppleInsider for illustrating my point in this article. As it turns out, AppleInsider is a horrible offender. I receive at least five or more spam emails per week to that address – and I’ve not used it anywhere else – so I KNOW they’ve either been hacked, or AppleInsider is selling people’s email address. There is no doubt.

Many sites I thought would end up spamming me simply don’t. I’ve not received any spam from WalMart, Facebook, Envato, or Digg. But I regularly receive spam to the address I create for CreativePro.com – a reputable site I wouldn’t have normally suspected of doing so. I signed up for a freebie whitepaper PDF file from BecomeABlogger.com once, and the site clearly stated they would not use the email for anything other than sending me the PDF. They obviously lied because I receive a ton of spam to that address.

Once you decide a site is spamming your inbox, you can “Block” that email address so you never have to see another email from them again.

Because OIB is web based, you might think it’s a bit of a pain to manage. But OIB sends you a Daily Digest of all your new emails at scheduled intervals. You can see at a glance that site XYZ has sent you 5 emails today, and site ABC sent you 50 this week, etc. This Digest is sent to your real email address.

OtherInbox is free, and worth trying out, if for no other reason than you can create all the email addresses you want, but you really don’t have to check them if you don’t want to. And they make it very easy to block addresses or even delete your OIB account if you want to. I wish all services were this useful and easy to use.