Here at ProfHacker, we like to experiment with new things, just to see whether they work well for us. Some things we find really improve our workflow or teaching style, and we adopt them more or less permanently. Other things we find don’t work so well, so we drop them.
Recently, I decided to give OtherInbox
a try, thinking it would be useful for organizing my inbox in GMail (OtherInbox also works with Yahoo! Mail). OtherInbox aims to save you time by automatically analyzing and sorting your inbox for you, letting you know what’s important and what can wait until later—assuming you need to deal with it at all.
When you connect your email account to OtherInbox, it immediately goes to work organizing your mail for you. It sets up a series of labels and sorts messages into them, as appropriate. You can see a sampling of some of the labels it sets up at left in the image below. [Click on any image for a larger version.]
OtherInbox will even very helpfully send you a daily digest, giving you a rundown of what emails it sorted, and what labels it applied to them before archiving them for you (you can also see a fuller list of OtherInbox labels at left):
I found that OtherInbox didn’t work very well for me because (a) I wasn’t terribly diligent in looking at the daily digest email and (b) I already have a fairly robust set of filters and labels set up. Those, along with GMail’s Priority Inbox, work better for me. That said, if you’re looking for an easy way to begin organizing your inbox, OtherInbox is definitely worth checking out; it does what it says it will do, and it does it well.
Have you used OtherInbox or a similar service for taming your inbox? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
[Lead image by Flickr user deryckh / Creative Commons licensed. All other images by Flickr user cavenderamy / Creative Commons licensed.
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