For the past few months, I’ve been using an email service in private beta called OtherInbox as a way to manage email from companies whose services I sign up for.

This is especially useful when you sign up for something and you just know they’re going to email you.

Even worse is when you sign up and the web page says you’ll not get marketing emails, yet that’s exactly what they then go ahead and do once they’ve got your email address. (I won’t name names but I was amazed at such devious behaviour by some companies.)

Now you can create unlimited disposable email addresses. How does it work? This is how OtherInbox describes it:

OtherInbox is a new way to manage email overload. You probably have an "other inbox" already, and it’s probably a Yahoo or Gmail account that you give out because you don’t want receipts, newsletters and social networking notifications to clutter your main email.

OtherInbox introduces a clever twist. Instead of just having a single email address such as johnsmith23@gmail.com, each user gets assigned their own domain name such as johnsmith.otherinbox.com or a vanity domain like johnsmith.com. Any address @johnsmith.com goes to your OtherInbox, so you can easily give a different email address to every website.

For instance, Amazon would get amazon@johnsmith.otherinbox.com. Without having to set up any folders or rules, your email gets organized so that it’s easy to jump right to the messages you care about. If a website sells your email address to spammers, you’ll be able to tell and can BLOCK it with a single click.

Pretty accurate as that’s how I’ve been using it.

I tweeted yesterday how brilliant I think OtherInbox is. The good folk there pay attention to Twitter (they use it) and have given me 50 beta invitations to offer to readers of this blog who might want to try the service out.

So, first 50 clicks, first 50 served. :)

OtherInbox has potential for becoming much more than purely a means to divert email that you consider as spam. I’ve not explored any of these areas yet, but OtherInbox has some great ideas on their blog.

I think it’s a great service (and here’s a good review on ReadWriteWeb).

Check it out, you’ve nothing to lose except spam.