Organizer and email follow-up

This is a follow-up to my post about OtherInbox Organizer from a few weeks back. They finally acknowledged that they’d made changes, via an email they sent about a week ago. Their main point was that the service is now much faster. I can’t dispute that; under the old version, emails would generally sit in my inbox for a few minutes before being filed. They were, I assume, running some kind of batch process that could only check once every few minutes. Now, it seems like emails are instantly filed. I’m not familiar with Google’s APIs for accessing Gmail, but I’d guess that they’ve switched to an API that’s more event-driven, where maybe they have a callback that gets called every time a new email comes in. Either that, or they just tossed more computing power at their old process, so it runs more often.

The one big annoyance from the recent change is that they stopped applying the general “OIB” tag to every organized email. (I mentioned this in the previous post.) Well, they fixed that as of last night, so I’m happy about that.

They don’t seem to have made any effort to restore some of the other related functionality, like applying a “receipt” tag to emails that look like receipts, or “shipping notice” to emails that look like shipping notices. But those functions weren’t working real well anyway, and I never really relied on them at all, so that’s fine.

In a nutshell, now that they’ve restored applying the general “OIB” tag, I’m pretty happy with them overall and will likely stick with them for now.

On a related subject, ProtonMail just announced some new features. They still don’t have IMAP/SMTP support, but they’re testing it and will probably roll it out before the end of the year. I’ve been messing around with ProtonMail a bit over the last couple of weeks, including installing their iOS app on my iPhone and iPad. It’s a pretty good app. Sometimes, apps for services like this are an afterthought, farmed out to a third-party developer, and the end result isn’t very good. But ProtonMail’s app is quite nice. Visually, it’s well-designed and looks good on both iPhone and iPad. It works well, and includes support for Touch ID. I haven’t quite talked myself into switching over to ProtonMail, but I like what they’re doing and they’ve made a ton of progress since they launched a few years ago.

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