OtherInBox aims to sort and summarize your e-mail inbox

If you’re like me, then you awaken every day to an e-mail Inbox filled with at least 25+ new messages, and that’s not even counting the other messages that were already filtered to folders/labels. Those new messages come in all shapes and sizes, and more than a few are from commercial senders, such as banks, retailers, etc. And those messages continue to pour in throughout the day.

If you treat your Inbox like a To Do list, then this can seem overwhelming. Gmail has decided that one way to tackle this is by prioritizing your e-mail. You assist Gmail’s built-in brain by marking e-mails up or down in priority/importance. While this may work for you, you may not wish to spend any incremental time continually training it like a puppy or a child.

Enter OtherInBox. OtherInBox (OIB) assesses all of your e-mail, organizes it based on sender and presents you with a dashboard summary of those messages. It will also summarize and send you a daily digest. The aim here is to get those e-mails out of your way and leave your inbox more slanted to personal messages.

Of course, one little problem is that OIB does not have, nor will it ever have, a complete list of all potential senders out there, so you will probably still end up with ‘unwanted’ messages sneaking into your main inbox. It also generates an additional 8 or so folders/labels, and again, if you’re like me, you tend to start ignoring and/or forgetting about those and they go unread for weeks at a time.

The elephant in the room that you should be aware of is that OIB’s business model is predicated on them learning from sorting your email what types of and how many messages you receive and collecting that data in order to re-share and re-sell it much in the same way that Nielsen watches what you watch on TV. Of course, your absolute personal data isn’t being collected, but you may object to even abstractions of your info being aggregated.

OIB and Priority Inbox are hardly the only ways to go, and you could just choose to go the more manual route and strive to have an InboxZero.

OIB is available for both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.