Email is undoubtedly the most heavily used electronic communication medium today. We use email to communicate in business, to stay in touch with friends and family, get shipment notifications, bill reminders, statements from the utility or cable company and on and on…

This convenience comes at a price.  Not only do our our inboxes become increasingly cluttered, but the more often we share our primary address on the Internet the greater the chance of getting onto spammers distribution lists as well.

I learned that lesson the hard way at the end of Dot-Com.  As fast as many of those companies went out of business, their customer or subscriber email addresses seemed to end up in spammer’s hands, either because of carelessness or perhaps for profit.

I decided then to stop sharing my primary email address with just anybody. Instead, I set up a special catchall email domain that allowed me to assign a dedicated address to every vendor, newsletter subscription, internet forum etc.  Any email addressed to the catchall domain is by default accepted and forwarded to a single mailbox.  That way I can hand out new addresses on the fly, like: amazon@catch-all-email.com, ups@catch-all-email.com, etc.  If I start receiving spam on any of these addresses I simply put them on a blacklist and future emails won’t go through. As a nice side effect, I can also track who is sharing or leaking my address purposely or due to internal data security problems.

This system has worked really well for many years now.  Of course, not everybody has the time and know-how to set this up, but there are a number of ways and solutions around that.

Many people are simply using free email accounts on Google, Yahoo! or Hotmail for this purpose.  Google’s powerful inbox filters easily sort and organize this catchall inbox.

There are now also a number of new services that productize the concept I described above.  Here are a couple that are worth mentioning:

• OtherInbox has launched a private Beta for their consumer service. There are a few Beta invites that they have shared with me. So feel free to check it out.
• Reflexion is offering a similar solution targeted at enterprise customers and ISP’s.

While it’s never too late to bring some order to your inbox, the best time to set up this kind of inbox management is when you switch to a new email address.

Technorati Tags: email overload, inbox management, catchall inbox, catchall account, otherinbox, refexion

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