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.
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.
