A company called EmailChannel has introduced a new, free service that it claims will help online users manage an overflow of e-mail. MyMailMutt launched yesterday as the first commercial e-mail management service.
When users sign up, they are given a unique e-mail address that they use whenever signing up at a third party’s Web site (for special offers, discounts, newsletters, alerts, etc.). According to the folks at EmailChannel, this MailMutt e-mail address cloaks the identity of the user and acts as the inbox for all the incoming commercial email. At the end of each day, users get one single email delivered to their primary e-mail account with a complete summary digest of all their commercial e-mails for that day. The digest is purportedly in an abbreviated format with links to the full content of each e-mail.
This reduces the amount of commercial e-mail users get in their primary account down to one single e-mail and serves to increase productivity, control and convenience — all while maintaining the highest level of privacy for users, said Ryan Clement, EmailChannel’s vice president of Internet products. He added that the summary digest goes a step further for productivity and convenience by delivering the three-line e-mail briefs by type (offer, general information, newsletter, etc.) and by category (travel, computers, automotive, etc.) plus indexes the entire contents for keyword searches at a later date.
“By 2004, U.S. marketers will send 200 billion commercial e-mail messages and people are beginning to already feel the pressure and time constraints that imposes on them — yet these e-mails often contain a lot of valuable information, so people don’t necessarily want to ignore them either,” Clement said. “That’s where MyMailMutt comes in and provides a solution for managing the inflow.”
MyMailMutt also goes a step beyond existing e-mail filters to provide advanced controls so consumers can block e-mails with certain keywords, from specific senders, with specific subject lines and relating to individual categories. Consumers can sign up for their free MyMailMutt account at the product Web site.
To use MailMutt, you just enter a keyword and click on “Search.” Additionally, you can view commercial e-mails from specific categories (such as computers and technology) to return non-specific commercial e-mails relevant to that category.
EmailChannel said the only software you need is a Web browser and that Netscape Navigator (3.0 or higher) or Microsoft Internet Explorer (4.0 or higher) are supported.