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Posts Tagged ‘email addresses’

18 Mar 2010

Google Apps is offering migration for Microsoft Exchange. The service is free with Google Apps Premiere or Google Apps Education.

Last July, Google Apps began offering migration from IBM’s Lotus Notes. Most enterprises are standardized on either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, which means that Google now pretty much can migrate any organization to the cloud. Google also offers connection to Blackberry Enterprise Server.Google Apps is providing migration for Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007.

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Microsoft has very limited capability to offer a cloud-based email environment. Most of the offerings it provides are locally installed, single-hosting services. Concerns will wane about cloud security. The ability to offer a cloud-based email environment for easy access will be the norm, not the exception. But even though Google has a jump, Microsoft will have its own offering. In the meantime, Google has an opportunity to make another leap into the enterprise.

This does represent a tipping point for many companies shedding IT assets. The question about email often comes up when companies consider moving to the cloud. It’s an important part of the migration. In recent weeks, we have seen how email is becoming a foundation for the evolution of a web oriented, social enterprise. Google Apps Marketplace offers the capability to offer third party applications that integrate with Google Apps. Email is a critical part of the equation in this Google ecosystem. It provides a backbone for companies to connect its employees with Google Apps and the associated third-parties.

The process to migrate looks relatively simple. Through Google Apps, a customer enters their Microsoft Exchange user name and what it calls “two-legged OAuth,” consisting of a consumer user key and a consumer “secret”. They then upload a .CSV file consisting of the email adresses, calendar and contact information. It is optional what to migrate. For example, an IT administrator may upload email addresses and contact data but not the calendar. Email service does not get interrupted during the migration.

This is a compelling offering for companies moving to the cloud. But it’s only part of the equation. Google still needs to prove it is robust enough for the enterprise to migrate to Google Apps. In the meantime, Microsoft needs to act fast and provide a cloud offering that at least gives its own community the option to move Microsoft Exchange to the cloud.

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Tags: csv file, email addresses, email adresses, google, google apps, lotus notes, microsoft exchange user, party applications, social enterprise

Put Your Email on Autopilot with OtherInbox

In: web resources

10 Mar 2010

Email communication has not changed much in the past decade, but the amount of email we get daily has grown exponentially. Be it relevant communication or spam, the sheer volume of emails received impacts our email productivity. Inboxes are inundated with too many newsletters, product updates and countless other services that send emails adding tremendous noise to the conversation stream.

OtherInbox comes as a cure for email overload. The Otherinbox team has not reinvented the email infrastructure, but has created a web app that acts as a workaround for common email painpoints. In this review, we’ll take a look at how OtherInbox solves email overload by using multiple email addresses.

Overview

Unlike other email services, instead of giving a single email address OtherInbox lets you create multiple email addresses using your own subdomain (username.otherinbox.com). There is virtually no limit to the number of email IDs you can create with your subdomain. The best part is, you don’t have to create email addresses in advance from your OtherInbox control panel. You can create an email address on the fly, while signing up at a site. Cool isn’t it?

OtherInbox Home

Pricing

OtherInbox follows a freemium business model. The main difference between the free and premium service, is the free service only displays mails received in the past 30 days. If you want to be able to view all your messages, you’ll need to subscribe to the premium account which costs a nominal $19.99 annual. For business users, OtherInbox allows creation of up to 10 delegates per account and their mailing activity is reported back to the administrator via a daily summary.

Pricing

Sign Up

The sign up can be done in two ways. First, you can sign up by linking your existing Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL account and let OtherInbox organize the mail for you. The second option is creating an Otherinbox account without inbox analysis.

Inbox Analysis

To start, let’s proceed with the second sign up option. The sign up page is simple and straight forward.

After filling out the form, the account can be activated via the confirmation mail sent to the registered email address.

Confirm Email

Those who hate lengthy mail IDs can use the username.oib.com subdomain instead of username.otherinbox.com. Mail will be delivered without fail for both subdomains.

Creating Multiple Mail IDs

OtherInbox addresses can be used to sign up anywhere in the web. For example, let’s say that I am tempted by an offer from wemightspamyou.com and want to sign up for their newsletter. To avoid a possible spam blitzkrieg, I do not want to give out my real email address. Instead, I decide to register with the email address wemightspamyou@username.otherinbox.com

Multiple Email Ids

There is absolutely no need to create the wemightspamyou@username.otherinbox.com email address from your OtherInbox account beforehand. OtherInbox creates an email ID once it receives mail addressed to your subdomain. A folder is created in your OtherInbox account for each of the custom address, and all future conversations with that mail ID are stored in that folder.

Create Email IDs

OtherInbox lets you create an infinite number of mail IDs to keep your inbox more organized. You can use one email ID for signups, say signups@myusername.otherinbox.com or alternatively create an email ID for each website you are signing up like ebay@myusername.otherinbox.com, amazon@myusername.otherinbox.com and so on.

Multiple Email IDs

All common email operations like read, archive, search, delete and reply can be done on all the custom addresses from a control panel with a familiar Outlook-style layout. When you login to your OtherInbox account, it features folders from every site you signed up with multiple addresses in the left pane. To read mails from a particular address, simply click on the respective folder and you can view/read all emails sent to that address.

No Filters

All this is possible without creating filters or even without logging into the OtherInbox account ahead of creating the email IDs. Sign-ups, newsletters, promotions, alerts, and personal mail can all be filtered, managed and grouped by OtherInbox in their own sweet little email IDs.

Stopping Spam

If a mail address is flooded with spam as suspected, all you have to do is to click the “Block All” button and that address is disabled completely. You will not receive mail from that particular address again. However as an after thought, if you want to receive mails from that address, you have the option to re-enable that inbox again.

Block Spam

Importing Mail From Other Accounts

To further enhance email productivity, OtherInbox can also import messages from any IMAP enabled email account and help in organizing the imported mails like newsletters, receipts, coupons, etc. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be a limit on the number of emails that can be saved in your OtherInbox account.

Organizing emails from another mail ID can be done while creating the account or from the settings menu after signing up, at your convenience.

Importing Email

Choose the mail service from the left panel, enter the login credentials and the import process will begin. OtherInbox takes a few minutes to import and organize all the mail. The entire process runs in the background (server side) and you will receive an email once the import is complete.

Email Scan

Once the import is complete, mail is grouped into their respective folders, eliminating noise from your conversation.

Email Grouping

Settings

OtherInbox lets you tweak the account from the settings page. All the mail can be exported from the settings page in plain text format for archiving. For those of us who prefer to use their own domain instead of a generic subdomain, that option comes with a premium subscription.

Email Export

Messages via RSS Feed

OtherInbox has additional options to auto-forward all incoming mail to another email address and to read your mails via RSS feeds. You can create an RSS feed for the entire OtherInbox account or for unread, saved and deleted messages.

Notifications

In addition, digests of the account can be scheduled at various intervals from the settings page.

Final Thoughts

OtherInbox promises to “Put your email on autopilot”. So confident with their promise OtherInbox has gone ahead and trademarked that tagline. After using the service for almost a year now, I’ve found that claim to be very true. I am reading only the mail I actually want to read. Gone are the days when I had to click the “Report as Spam” button multiple times a day. OtherInbox mailboxes are ad free and have encryption (https) turned on by default. For the rich set of features it offers, Otherinbox premium is a steal for less than two dollars a month.

Not being able to read mail that is more than 30 days old does irk me at times, but that problem can be solved with a premium subscription. After many months of using the service, I am surprised at the serious lack of new features. However wonderful the app may be, OtherInbox needs to push forward with newer features to keep the service going. I’m giving a 8/10 to Otherinbox with a strong nudge to incorporate new features.

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Tags: aol account, email addresses, email services, gmail, Hotmail, mail, product updates, relevant communication, sheer volume

Watch Out Who You Reply To On Google Buzz, You Might Be Exposing Their Email Address

In: web resources

12 Feb 2010

The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear. One issue raised earlier today is that the people you follow and who follow you are made public by default on your profile page, but are based on people who you email the most in private. You can make these lists invisible, but it remains an opt-out process instead of an opt-in one.

It turns out there is another privacy flaw in Google Buzz that can expose private email addresses to everyone who follows you. Google Buzz borrows the @reply convention from Twitter so that if you want to reply to someone or direct a comment to them you simply put the @ sign in front of their name. Google autosuggests names from your contact list as you start typing. Normally, this doesn’t cause any problems if you select the Gmail account or chat name associated with that person’s public profile. It ends up posting their name, and not their email address.

But if you select a name or account that is not public, Buzz will fill in with their private email. For example, I wanted to direct a comment at TechCrunch writer MG Siegler, so I typed in “@mg” and up came three of his different emails. I picked his TechCrunch email, not realizing that his public profile is linked to a different Gmail account. What this means is that the 231 people following me on Buzz can all see MG’s private email address in my comment even if they had no direct connection to him before. They can now send him unsolicited emails and spam galore. Now multiply that type of potential exposure by the millions of people already using Buzz, and you can see why it is a hole that should be patched up quickly.

I asked Google to explain how all of this works, and here is their response:

Generally typing someone’s email address autocompletes with that person’s name and therefore their address is not visible to anyone. Only in cases when you don’t have access to a person’s name and there is no name to connect to that email address, the system will show that person’s address instead of their name. This is very rare, and only happens when:

the person who’s address you’re typing doesn’t have a public profile OR

they are not Following you and you are not connected via Chat.

The moment you post, it will be very obvious that the email address is publicly visible, and you can always edit and/ or delete that post.

Except that it is not rare. Many of my contacts, including the ones using Buzz, have multiple email addresses. When I type their name in Buzz to reply to them, the autosuggest box shows me all the different email addresses I have for them in Gmail, and doesn’t specify which of those are public or private. When I typed in MG’s name, for instance, I chose the TechCrunch email because that is the one I use the most. I had no idea that his Gmail address is the one linked to his public profile, and thus the one I should have used to protect his privacy.

In my eyes that is a design flaw. Google actually expects us to pick up on these things and protect each other’s privacy, rather than the other way around. What happens when you inadvertently type in someone’s email address? According to Google:

In this case, a person attempts to type an @reply using a contact’s email address, types out the email address, and then after posting sees the email address plainly displayed in the post. It is expected that after this, most people would understand that the email address will be visible to the viewers of the post. The user can edit or delete the post.

Sorry, but that is expecting too much from the average user, who probably wouldn’t even notice such a tiny detail. It’s really up to Google to warn users or to make sure that only public names come up in the autocomplete. How hard can that be? Instead, Google is telling us that it is our problem and we should be more vigilant using their product.

In the overall scheme of things, this is a small and fixable flaw for a feature that 80 percent of people may never even use. But it is an example of what can go wrong when you inject private contacts into a public stream. Google needs to be extra careful with details like this one.

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Google Buzz

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