OtherInbox work around

A little while ago I blogged about OtherInbox. Just to follow up, I’m still using it and I still think it’s a really really helpful tool.

One of my little annoyances w/ the service came along w/ my twitter notifications. If I had them all sent to my OI, it meant that I wasn’t getting my direct message notifications as quickly as I wanted to (I usually don’t have them sent to my phone. Email is fast enough). However, if I have them all showing up in my normal inbox I’m still getting new follower notifications allong with the rest of my emails. Those are exactly the types of things that I wanted in my OI because they simply aren’t urgent and just clutter my gmail account. I poked around looking for some sort of filter and I asked on twitter, but it didn’t seem to exist. Not one to accept defeat, I created my own filter:

How to filter your OtherInbox twitter emails using Gmail as your main inbox

1. Have twitter send your notifications to your gmail address or wherever you want your DMs to be sent (this isn’t required, but it cuts down on how many times the poor little DMs are forwarded across the internet before they get to their final destination)
2. Take a look at a recent twitter new follower notification. If you click “show details” (next to the time stamp) it will show you a ‘from’ address that should be formatted like this:
   <twitter-follow-YOURNAMEHERE=gmail.com@postmaster.twitter.com>
3. Copy that email address.
4. Go to “Settings” (top right)
5. Click the ‘filters’ tab
6. Click “create new filter” (bottom center)
7. Paste the email address from step 2 in the FROM field. Then click “Next Step”
8. There are a lot of ways you can do this, but here’s how I did it: Check “skip inbox” and then check “forward it to” and put in the twitter@YOURNAMEHERE.otherinbox.com
9. That’s it!

If you follow those steps (and I didn’t write them incorrectly) you should receive your DM notifications in your gmail inbox but all your new follower notifications will go to your OtherInbox. Hurray!

(Just a note: before I did this I was having my twitter notifications forwarded to me from OI and marked as read there. I needed to change that so that when new follower notifications came in I would see them. Make sure your forwarding preferences are set to let you see the emails you need to see!)

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Let me know if you try this out and it works for you. Is there another way you might try to use this same idea? Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments!

Explore posts in the same categories: Hints and tips

Tags: bacn, email, gmail filter, hack, OtherInbox, tip, twitter, work around

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