Announcing Defender 2.0 integrated with Gmail

September 28 2010, 2:01pm

This is a shout out to the original OtherInbox users who have been with us since the beginning! The first product we launched allowed you to give out unlimited disposable email addresses that you can make up on the fly like amazon@yourname.oib.com. These days we refer to it as Defender. We created Defender to address the problem where you would give out your email address to a website, a service, a person, and start getting spam as a result. Before Defender, you probably had no idea who was sending you unwanted emails. Defender empowered you to know exactly who was sending you spam AND the ability to block an address so they never bothered you again. Defender hasn’t received a lot of attention in the past year, but a lot has changed outside of OtherInbox. Gmail now offers OAuth and OpenID access to the Inbox and introduced new options for managing labels and nesting them. We came up with a way to use Defender inside Gmail, the same way that you can use Organizer inside of Gmail. This immediately addresses some of the biggest feature requests we’ve had for Defender:

Search Mobile web Better IMAP support Send email with attachments Offline access

I’ve been testing it out for a couple months now and I think its much better for me. I hope you will think so too! Defender 2.0 Here’s how it works. Instead of sending your email to OtherInbox, we route all of the emails for your domain name to a new Google Apps email account under the yourname.oib.com domain name (or your custom domain). Just like the original Defender, any email sent to any address @yourname.oib.com goes to one account, but now you go to http://mail.google.com/a/yourname.oib.com to check your email instead of http://my.otherinbox.com. Instead of using the OtherInbox web page, you use the Gmail web page. Organizer labels the messages based on where they come from, and now groups them into categories such as Home, News, Shopping, Social and Travel. Note: You’ll still receive your Daily Digest email and can now easily set up a rule to forward it to any other email address. Now Defender is inside Gmail To switch over to Google Apps, Defender users will need to do three things:

Sign up for a Google Apps account Verify your OIB domain Activate Organizer

The links above provide step-by-step instructions on how to set things up. We’ve also set up instructions for:

Using multiple domains with Google Apps (Note: yourname.oib.com and yourname.otherinbox.com are technically two different domains, so use this to get all your email if you’ve used both) Copying emails from OtherInbox to Google Apps

By the end of the year, all Defender users will need to have made this switch. After December 31, 2010, we will be turning off the OtherInbox web page (http://my.otherinbox.com). This will have good side effects Once we transition everyone from Defender 1.0 to 2.0, we will be able to delete a lot of code and turn off a few servers. We no longer will be maintaining code that duplicates functionality  provided by Gmail (message viewing, composing, IMAP) and instead can focus on better organization, spam protection, and exciting email apps to come! Any questions or comments? Please take a look at our Defender 2.0 FAQ (which we will be constantly updating). Also, please leave us your comments below or send us an email to help@otherinbox.com. I always want to hear from you and address any questions or concerns you may have.