If there’s one thing that unites every single person who works with computers for the majority of their work, it has to be the amount of email we all receive.

At least, that’s my estimation. I don’t know. I’ve been too busy responding to emails to conduct a scientific study.

But seriously, there’s a lot to be said for making sure we control who has access to our inbox and who doesn’t. And I know: We’re living in an age where everyone is trying to “fix” email with a variety of different clients.

The Throttle Homepage

The Throttle Homepage

But I came across Throttle some time ago, have been using it ever since, and am really happy with how it helps me manage my email, especially for various online accounts.

What’s Throttle?

It’s pretty simple, but I love the way it works. From the homepage:

Throttle is a smart browser extension that generates unique email addresses for everything you use online, so that you can control who sends you email and when.

In short, it works like this:

  1. You create an account for Throttle,
  2. You install a browser extension,
  3. Whenever you navigate to a site that requires a login, and you don’t want to give it your standard email address, you use the browser extension.

From that point forward, you log into the site or your email address is subscribed to a service or newsletter, all of the messages will be sent to that address. Rather than showing up in your inbox, it shows up in your Throttle dashboard.

At first, I started experimenting with it using a single service and then began using it for a variety of other services, newsletters, and other similar things that I care about but only want to review on my schedule (versus having it pushed to my inbox).

I’ve not used the premium service though I’m a fan of what the free tier offers.

If you’re looking to pair down your inbox and still take advantage of some services (like social networks or something similar), then it’s not a bad alternative.