2 great productive solutions - Other Inbox and Remember the Milk for Gmail
Dan Thornton | November 17, 2008I’ve been spending a lot of time hypothesizing about various things, so I’ll redress the balance with two practical tools I’m using which have really helped me recently.
Signing up for so many services for both work and pleasure put a real strain on my email inbox. So much so, that i was starting to dread the next time I had to enter my email address into a signup box to figure out whether a service was any good or not. Thankfully, something in my memory suddenly kicked into gear and I remembered a friend (Thanks, Tim) had invited me to OtherInbox.
I’ve started using it today, and it’s a simple and brilliant solution. When you sign up for a new service, simply used servicename@username.otherinbox.com. Then, all registration emails, updates and any spam is sent to Other Inbox, and automatically filed into folders for each service.
So I can easily find my login details, or check which services might have led to spam emails, without having to set up 101 fake email addresses!
The other huge productivity boon comes from my final acceptance that Googlemail really is awesome - particularly with Google labs opening up to Gadgets. I already inserted Google Docs into my email account, which is useful, but then I found out Task Management service Remember the Milk now has a Google Gadget! That means I now have my email, documents I’m working on, and my task list in one place to keep track.
Combine that with using OtherInbox for better filtering, and suddenly Googlemail is becoming a personal hub for my online life and reinvigorating my waning interest in ever using email.
I can already see myself with 3 hubs for my entire life.
- One for my external publishing on blogs etc,
- One for managing my personal profiles,
- One for my personal communication and productivity.
Google is already taking care of 3. And various Twitter and blog uploading applications are competing for my attention. Meanwhile OpenSocial and Facebook Connect are working towards solving 2.
Thanks for the mention - you forgot to point out
Tim | November 17, 2008Thanks for the mention - you forgot to point out that google calendar sync also syncs with Outlook.
so you can daisy chain different RTM accounts into Google Calendar, sync that with Outlook and set up rules for different labels.
So your collated calendar events and tasks (or a selection thereof) can be there in your desktop client and use views to see them all or filter them as needed - then you have an offline version too without Gears.
Also works the other way so if a colleague or client sends you an Outlook appointment or Free/Busy email this is added to calendar and updated to GCal on next sync. So you can update your open source/social calendar with work items using the existing system rather than getting colleagues to share a GCal system or the like.
i then sync certain categories and accounts with my phone calendar which is in bluetooth sync.
I use this in conjunction with the Zoho Outlook plug in so sales tasks and milestone design tasks are all collated and updated to and from to the relevant area for recording.
So if Zoho pipes up with “chase approval on design X task overdue” this is added to my Outlook workday tasks and calendar and added to my gmail central calendar for “what was i working on that day?” reference. But this can sit alongside a GCal reminder to post my dad’s birthday card in either the main GCal online, Gears offline version or Outlook.
Selected items (appointments) are synced to my phone with the assorted category. Sadly i have yet to create an appointment on my phone assign the custom category for Zoho and get it to sync correctly but thats an edge case scenario anyway.
there are single supplier end to end solutions for the same (mostly based around Exchange or its clones) but this works well with existing hardware and accounts so minimal change to existing process or preferred tools. And its free.
Now i need to find a decent push email relay which works with the Sony Ericsson G900 - in theory it supports Exchange standard so should work with clones but so far no joy on Push or indeed POP3 polling.
[...] already shown how to improve your email experiences with
TheWayoftheWeb » Another great tool for improving email - this time, Outlook | November 19, 2008[...] already shown how to improve your email experiences with the Remember The Milk gadget for Googlemail, and OtherInbox for filtering signups and other email de…. But, like many people, I’m tied to Outlook for my main corporate email - but there’s [...]
Dan, Thanks for writing about OtherInbox! We hope you're enjoying our
Alex | November 21, 2008Dan,
Thanks for writing about OtherInbox! We hope you’re enjoying our service. I’d like to offer your readers a chance to try us out as well. We are still in private beta, but your readers can sign up at this URL:
http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/wayoftheweb
I look forward to reading any further comments or suggestions you might have about OtherInbox. Thanks!
~The OtherInbox Team