Sunday, September 21, 2008

otherinbox - solution for student accounts

otherinbox.com is a new, still in beta service, which enables the user to create unlimited email addresses on the fly, based on his account it could be very useful for teachers needing to set up "fake" student email addresses to enable students to sign up to webservices.
The gmail+ system used by many educators is useful but not all web services support sign up from email addresses which incorporate a plus sign. Of course it is possible to sign up to many websites with a completely bogus mail address but that puts the dampers on retrieving passwords etc in the event that students forget them.

With otherinbox.com user (in our case, teacher) gets a mail subdomain which catches all mail sent to it. So if the subdomain is: itteacher.otherinbox.com mail sent to susan@itteacher.otherinbox.com and mail sent to jostudent@itteacher.otherinbox.com are both caught by the mailbox and automatically placed in the respective folder, ie the jostudent folder and the susan folder. This enables the teacher to see at a glance which alias has new mail, see screencapture. There is no need to set up the aliases ahead of time, they are created automatically when mail arrives in the inbox.

At present incoming mail can only be automatically forwarded to the account holders primary mail, however if it were possible to set up filters to forward to other mail accounts, I could see this as being an excellent service not only for enabling students to sign up for web services but also for moderating student mail.





Posted by email from susan's posterous

2 comments:

Paul Hamilton said...

Thanks for sharing this, Susan. Looks like it could be very helpful! --Paul

OtherInbox said...

Hello Susan,

Thanks for writing about OtherInbox on your blog. The TC50 conference in San Francisco earlier this month was a great forum to launch our new service to the public and we were really honored to be chosen to participate. We’d like to invite you to join our private beta that we announced at the conference, and we’re happy to extend the invitation to your readers as well! Because we’re in private beta, you need to have a special URL to sign up. This URL will work for 26 invitations (one for you and 25 for your readers) if you want to post as a followup on your blog.

http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/dd4e8


Please let us know if you have any questions about the service. Thanks again!

~ The OtherInbox Team