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Subscribe to RSSChecking your email can seem like playing "Spam Invaders," where your objective is to kill as many retailer email messages before they reach your brain and drive you crazy. Just in time for the holidays, three new online services, Shopilly, Azigo, and Hipti, aim to help you extract the “spiced ham” from the spam.
With retailers starting their holiday email campaigns even earlier this year than last, and the number of emails they're sending out each week projected to rise, consumers will need all the help they can get.
At the broadest level, each of the three services gives you a Pinterest-esque, photo-heavy grid as a dashboard for keeping track of the same deals you would get if you were signed up for the retailer's customer email list. Where they differ is to what degree they help you manage your existing personal inbox, how deep the filtering tools are, and how good they look.
"Good-looking spam?" Yes, these services are making it possible.
Shopilly is the most-promising and spiffiest of the bunch. Its killer feature is that, with your permission, it imports spam and commercial messages from your inbox. You can set the filter to keep out the riffraff so that only trusted Shoplift-affiliated brands show up, or that all email from merchants and newsletters goes in. It can even delete the original messages from your inbox. You can also set it so that the deleted messages are archived in a special folder, just in case the e-maid gets overzealous and an important message goes missing. The service also gives you a custom @shopilly.com email address that you can give retailers, at checkout, when creating an online account, or filling out those surveys and sweepstakes that you know are just email harvesters.
Azigo also lets you transform your brand emails spam into an appealing streaming visual matrix, and provides an @azigo email address to give out instead of your personal email. What the site will do differently is let you import your existing online account information so you can see that data in your dashboard too. It also boasts a broader spectrum of brands to choose to follow, although '"more" doesn't always mean "better."
Hipiti's approach is different in that it doesn't interact with your inbox at all. Instead, you pick brands to follow and you see the same deals on your dashboard as if you subscribed to their email list. The most promising feature of the site is its deal-filtering mechanism, allowing you to sort your deals by when they end, the type of deal offers, like flash sale, free shipping, or containing a coupon code, and topic category. While currently in private beta, it's not hard to find an invite code for Hipiti with a little light Googling.
In the end, there's nothing wrong with merchant emails or spam, per se, Anirban Datta, Shoppily CEO and former eBay senior product manager, told NBC News. It's how the messages are presented, and that they interrupt your personal email. "Shopping is visual," he said. "Email was not designed for shopping."
(Tip of the hat to Fast Company.)
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I find that sorting filters in Hotmail work great for this. You can sort based on contents of many fields, put them into folders of your choice or even fully delete them right away. I see only about 5-7 emails a day in my junk folder, and almost none in my inbox. Works much better than blocking by address or domain.
I stop accepting email for November , December, January.
Once a retailer gets your email address they're like rabid dogs. They send you an email DAILY sometimes multiple and it's not promotions at all it's just advertisement and hype hype hype (I'm looking at you Ann Taylor....) I created a separate gmail account that I use for ordering of merchandise or to give to retailers I use the most. Then when I actually need something I check that email to see if there is anything useful. Most of the time it's not. Coupon codes, flash sales? I never seem to get any of those just never ending useless brand-spam about their "omg latest and most chic fab awesome new merchandise omg look look look!!!!!!".
Companies that use their email spamming carefully and sparingly are the ones that can actually keep people on their lists but, well, you can't tell these companies anything. They think they know best.
Personal e-mail goes to one account, NO ONE gets this address except friends. Another account is set up for everything else. On the everything else account almost all is set to go to the "Junk" mail section and is checked about once a month. Usually 4 or 5 pages.
I am an IT with 28 years if hands on experience. I regularly cleans up peoples computers to make them work better. I believe that SPAM is best defined as unsolicited commercial email. I have a different standard for bad guys than most ITs. Any software that exhibits bad behaviors such as getting installed without direct and informed permission by the client, communicates to unknown entities on the internet without permission and doesn’t completely remove itself when the owner uses the uninstall routine that came with it is a bad guy. I remove Hipiti, Azigo and Shopzilla exception because they have exhibited all of the bad qualities listed here.
I use a special un-installer to remove them as the one provided by the application developer will generally leave the most evil part the application installed. My un-installer will analyze what is left after the applications uninstaller is finished and show me the registry entries and files and folders and then remove theses parts that don't get removed by the application developer’s routine.
Because the installation method used to get these applications installed is definitely Trojan-esque, the dubious idea that there is such a thing as ‘Good’ SPAM described by the author here and the fact that these programs are not willing to remove all of
their features when the computer owner says ‘be gone’ by running the uninstall
routine: I have classified Hipiti, Azigo and Shopzilla as MALWARE.
In addition I need express definite concern about the likelihood that Ben Popken has a motive other than a the apparent desire to provide intelligent, knowledgeable and helpful information to help novice computer users circumvent the problems created by the evil denizens of the internet. There must be some ulterior motive to get a reasonably intelligent person to publish such bad advice under the obvious and thin disguise of helpfulness.
Billy Jo, you are correct about your definition of SPAM, but Azigo (and I believe our competitors) is the opposite of malware by your own definition. First, Azigo is a web service, it is not software installed on the person's machine at all. Second, it explicitly requests access to the user's Gmail inbox (well, API really), and only can help organize the user's commercial emails that it finds in that inbox if the user explicitly grants our (OAuth) request.
In short, Azigo is a personal agent that the user explicitly signs up for and authorizes to do things on the user's behalf.
Hi Billy Jo,
Shopilly also doesn't install any type of software. It is a website (like MSNBC.com is), not malware. Our goal with Shopilly is to help consumers organize their shopping life in a visually elegant interface, and cut the clutter out of their personal inboxes.
Anirban
Sorry, my response got duplicated, and I can't seem to be able to delete the second one.
I seem to have my in-box pretty well protected from all the c**p that comes in unsolicited. I only wish the "do not call" setup was as efficient. How do we stop the robo calls asking us to change our electric companies? Every day, sometimes every half an hour, I get these robo calls. Reporting them (multiple times) does bubkis.
all things that come to your inbox that you did not expressly ask for is spam. It is an endless intrusion of my privacy and time. I hate it. Also this consumerism mentality is what got us into this financial debacle we are presently in. Stop sending sub conscious messages to people that they need things that are actually wants. It is rediculous
Both Shopilly and Azigo seem to have some sort of Gmail-Scanning feature which imports all marketing messages to your new account on their site. After trying both, I am convinced that Azigo's is superior. Azigo scanned my Gmail inbox, imported all marketing messages I allowed it to, and set up a new subfolder in my Gmail inbox to keep my messages there. Shopilly actually imported my entire inbox. Now I don't know how to revert these changes and its a huge pain in my butt. Not sure why this happened, but Shopilly definitely has some improvements to make in this regard.
All and all, both these services look very promising, but it seems like there are definitely some kinks that still need to be worked out. For now, I'll be using Azigo until these other services can win me over with improved usability.
Thanks for the article though Ben... some helpful apps here.
Hi John:
Thanks your comment. Also we're glad to know that you find these services useful and promising :-)
We appreciate your feedback; it helps us to improve our service. We just launched Shopilly on Oct 1st, and our goal is to delight users and put them in control of their retailer email experience. Choosing automatic import is optional, and it also gives users the choice to restrict what is imported to known retail brands. Users who are trying it out have generally reacted positively and have given us valuable feedback to make it better. As I write, we are working on doing just that.
We'd be delighted to hear from you on any other feedback you may have. If you write to us at support@shopilly.com, we will get on it asap.
Anirban
Ben, I'm surprised you didn't include LykeBox. I'm the CEO of LykeBox, the pioneer of this field. You'll find LykeBox has been doing this the longest and has the features consumers are looking for: Scan your gmail or yahoo mail, scan your twitter account, all private and secure, and follow any brands you want. Give it a try and send your feedback on the site.
Anirban and the team at Azigo have done a great job in getting visibility for this much needed service category. LykeBox continues to innovate and delight Lykers.
(oops, ended up creating this second comment, but read...)
Ben, I'm surprised that you missed LykeBox, the pioneer of this field. LykeBox is a better way to follow brands you Like in Facebook or follow on Twitter and gives users a better inbox for marketing and newsletters. The way we see it, if you don't hit "reply" in your inbox, move it to LykeBox.
I'm the CEO and I have some bias, of course. I invite everyone to try LykeBox for themselves and send in feedback on the site.
Azigo and Shopilly have done a good job getting visibility for our category of services. We're all working hard to improve shopping and marketing and to streamline the process so that it is more productive and less intrusive.
Free and simple, LykeBox keeps innovating. I hope articles like yours will continue to educate consumers on the power of questioning the status quo. As more consumers use services like ours, marketers will get the message and embrace our new solutions.