Inbox Heroes: 10 Startups Tackling Email Overload

Adrianne Jeffries — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:00:24 -0400

Around December 1964, researchers at the MIT Computation Center sent a memo to the programming staff. “A new command should be written to allow a user to send a private message to another user which may be delivered at the receiver’s convenience,” the note read. Flash forward 45 years, and our inboxes are flooded. Expedia has a 24-hour travel deal. The New Yorkerwould like you to renew your subscription. Your friend is writing with tears in her eyes that she’s in Paris and has been robbed and would you please send money. Facebook wants you to know that someone liked something you wrote a week ago. Your cousin sent the extended family a link to a video of an a cappella group rapping about Hanukkah.

Email! There is now so much of it, and more is being created all the time. It's always open in a tab; it's on our phones. Fortunately, VCs are having the same problem--and they're throwing money at it. Check out these 10 startups trying to fix email.

Create an email address at Shortmail, and the startup will reject any incoming messages that are more than 500 characters with a friendly message asking the sender to edit it down. You can use Shortmail with Gmail, but the startup says most users prefer to keep a separate, short inbox in addition to their regular email practice. Outbound messages append a user-customizable signature, letting recipients know they should reply in 500 characters or fewer.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/shortmail.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/shortmail.png?w=583" width="150" height="102" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/shortmail.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Shortmail (Baltimore)" /> New York techies love Boomerang, the Gmail and Outlook extension from Baydin, the startup that also makes the Email Game, an email client that uses game mechanics to assist with email workflow. Boomerang helps with email management by allowing users to schedule emails to send later, regulating when all the replies-to-replies come in, or disappear emails from the inbox and have them reappear a day later or at a specific time.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/boomerang.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/boomerang.png?w=600" width="150" height="115" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/boomerang.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Boomerang (Mountain View)" /> “The typical knowledge worker loses 1/3 of their day to email interruptions,” AwayFind says. The startup monitors the inbox for urgent messages based on user-created filters, and automatically forwards them to you via SMS or your iPhone/Android so you can safely walk away from the inbox. The startup also offers users an AwayFind contact form so a determined sender can guarantee that a message gets marked urgent.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/awayfind.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/awayfind.png?w=783" width="150" height="71" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/awayfind.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="AwayFind (San Francisco)" /> Another startup from the second-inbox camp: OtherInbox de-clutters your email by automatically organizing messages from online shopping and social networking sites, in theory creating two inboxes: one for people, one for robots. OtherInbox also organizes shipping information, payment reminders, and upcoming sales and places them on your calendar as painlessly as possible.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/otherinbox.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/otherinbox.png?w=595" width="150" height="85" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/otherinbox.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="OtherInbox (Austin)" /> Kwaga is rolling out a series of email tools based around its patented semantic technology that automatically detects and extracts key information like dates and contact information from inside email text. Kwaga also has an A.P.I. for its natural language processing technology. The startup’s first application is called WriteThat.Name, an automagic updater for your address book that extracts contact information from emails.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/kwaga.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/kwaga.png?w=600" width="150" height="113" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/kwaga.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Kwaga (Paris)" /> There is an entire category of email startups addressing the email problem by making it easy to convert emails into tasks (Y Combinator’s TaskForce, Mark Hurst’s Good Todo and Google Tasks are other examples of this strategy). But Producteev’s email-to-task feature is just one part of a full productivity management suite, intended for students, startups, and single workers to manage a complicated to-do list. Even though the Producteev interface looks a little too much like another inbox, the integration with Gmail, Google Calendar and mobile and the optimization for different use cases makes for a promising effort.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/producteev1-e1318355406536.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/producteev1-e1318355406536.png?w=600" width="150" height="87" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/producteev1-e1318355406536.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Producteev (New York City)" /> The agony of group conversations is one of the most consistent gripes about email. “Reply all” and “cc” or “bcc” can turn a conversation into an endless thread of comments that everybody probably doesn’t need to read, y’know? Micromobs creates a Facebook-esque interface for group emails and other text-based asynchronous group conversations. Micromobs lets you forward a threaded email to mobthis@micromobs.com, which creates a microbmob for that conversation and invites all the parties for you. Ideally, your colleagues will join the Micromob and leave your inbox be. Of course, it has the unfortunate side effect of creating, basically, another inbox.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/micromobs.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/micromobs.png?w=608" width="150" height="88" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/micromobs.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Micromobs (Mountain View)" /> From the Priority Inbox camp comes SaneBox, which integrates with all major mail clients. SaneBox has five levels of importance for emails and sends all the unimportant ones to the “SaneLater” folder to be checked at the user’s leisure. But–and this part sounds awful to us–the startup sends users a daily SaneLater digest “so you never have to leave your inbox.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/sanebox.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/sanebox.png?w=460" width="150" height="85" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/sanebox.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="SaneBox (Boston)" /> ZeroMail is a minimalist email client that uses social media profiles to contextualize your inbox. An automagic virtual assistant builds personalized filters, checks the spam folder for real mail, and unsubscribes from newsletters. Like OtherInbox, ZeroMail hopes to separate the human emails from the robot emails, segregating automated messages, social networks and mailing lists from personalized email. It also emphasizes the need to translate emails into tasks, with a built-in to do list. ZeroMail also allows you to “snooze” emails or flag an email to expect a response within five days, features reminiscent of some of the popular email plug-ins like Boomerang.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/zero-mail-e1318376272826.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/zero-mail-e1318376272826.png?w=600" width="150" height="92" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/zero-mail-e1318376272826.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="ZeroMail (Sydney)" /> What it sounds like! The unsubscribe button is seamlessly integrated with major email client. If unwanted senders continue to pester you, Unsubscribe asks that you file a complaint so the startup can go after the offender. Unsubscribe is free–the startup rather cleverly makes its dough off things like its certification process, through which it bestows seals of approval for privacy protection and “responsible marketing.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/unsubscribe.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/unsubscribe.png?w=595" width="150" height="116" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/unsubscribe.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Unsubscribe.com (Santa Monica)" /> It’s not technically a startup, but Google rolled out its own solution to email overload in July 2010. Many emailers are still afraid to try Priority Inbox. Letting a robot decide which emails are important? Terrifying, especially when you realize Gmail inexplicably tossed an important email from a friend into spam three weeks ago. But Priority Inbox is imminently customizable depending on how much you want to trust it, and it gets better with time as it watches what you read, open and delete. It displays as many of the “unimportant” messages in your inbox as you want–it just places them below the “important” line and doesn’t count them in the number of unread messages.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/priority-inbox1.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/priority-inbox1.png?w=600" width="150" height="99" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/priority-inbox1.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Gmail Priority Inbox (Mountain View)" />

Betabeat » Inbox Heroes: 10 Startups Tackling Email Overload

Inbox Heroes: 10 Startups Tackling Email Overload