The Throttle email management tool gives you greater control and privacy.
Update 10/28/21: I still continue to use and recommend Throttle, and haven’t had any problems with it.
Update: 10/9/17: See the comments below. Users are reporting some difficulties. I occasionally have minor problems but as of now, I still recommend the product for non-critical, shopping and newsletter-type messages. [End update.]
If you’re looking for an email management tool to help get your inbox under control, let me introduce to you Throttle. I’ve been using Throttle for a couple of months now, and I officially love it! I love it so much, in fact, that I’ll be recommending Throttle in the next edition of my book, “Personal Productivity Secrets.” If you’ve read that book, you may remember that it touted an email management tool called Otherinbox, which (sadly) is now defunct. But Throttle is a great replacement for Otherinbox — and, actually, an even better product. Here’s how it works: You can use Throttle on your desktop, phone or tablet. When you install the Throttle browser extension, you never have to give your real email address to a website again. The extension fills out email submission forms with a unique Throttle address.
The Throttle daily digest
Throttle then takes all of your emails and compiles them into a single daily digest (at right) that it sends to you at a time you choose. When you get your digest, just click on the message you want to read and Throttle will take you to your dashboard. You can then read the message there or forward it to your real email address if you want to. It’s a great solution for wrangling all the emails you do want to see (like newsletters or discount offers from your favorite merchants) but that you don’t want to distract or overwhelm you as they fill your inbox throughout the day. If you ever want to revoke a sender’s address to your email box, you can do it with a single click instead of dealing with the sender’s unsubscribe process. And, you can also tell when senders sell your email address and immediately cut off their access to your inbox. Throttle is a better solution than having a “junk” email address as some people do (and as I did, before I had Throttle) because you won’t have to worry about checking for email in two places. Everything is centralized into one message and comes into your main email inbox, but your address stays private. Throttle’s plans include free for the basic plan, suitable for most, and a nominal amount for the pro plan if you want some cool advanced features. I suggest you give Throttle a try. It will bring some sanity to your email inbox.
When was this written? The service seems to have fallen over. Digests not being sent and none of the interface buttons working, it is a real mess
Derek, thanks for reading and for your comment! This article is not that old but you are correct, I have been disappointed that Throttle seems to be having some technical issues. I reached out to their team and was told that a patch is being rolled out (end of December, 2016). I haven’t experienced the interface buttons not working, on the digest not being sent. When it works, it’s SO useful to me that I am giving them time to work out the bugs. I hope that will be soon. Perhaps give it another try in a few weeks. Thanks again for reading!
I think it is a fantastic service, I am a pro user, but they seem to have dropped the ball as of late but I am willing to wait and see if they resolve the issues. Hopefully it will be sorted asap.
How is the service as of 2017 October? Currently there is a lifetime deal for $99 here:
https://depot.xda-developers.com/sales/throttle-pro-lifetime-subscription
I am very tempted to buy, but $99 is a bit pricey for an investment such as this. It’s even more difficult to justify spending this money, when there are little to no development of the product/service for the past 6 months ~ 1 year. I could not find many reviews about this product and the ones I did find only mention the core/basic features that it offered when it was first released. The comments found on Product Hunt were from 1~2 years ago, so it’s a bit outdated.
There is however 1 comment on Product Hunt from 1 month ago, which I will quote here:
“The Pro plan said it has a feature called instant forwarding, but they never tell you that feature was temporally disabled. I upgrade my account to a Pro Plan which cost $99 an year and I got the worst customer support. The daily digest stop working three times in 2 months and never be fixed without manually contacting the staff. The instant forwarding feature was been temporally stopped and never be fixed since last 2 months. Throttle team also never publish any updates or features in the past 6 months. I would tell my friend don’t use this service, it possibly be shut down in this year.”
Source:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/throttle
And another:
“The customer support is non-existent, but the service itself does what it’s supposed to and has vastly cut down on my trash emails for me.”
Source:
https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/mailhero-2
I’ve checked out Throttle’s website and clicked their Support link. It just goes to a KB page with FAQs. The only actual contact is their Twitter and Facebook, both are inactive and the posts are just sales/ads type of posts to market the Throttle. The last thing I’d want is to pay $99 and not get any customer service, because it’s a small company after all. Sure it’s a great product, but it could collapse at any time.
Furthermore, if you check the site for Throttle Pro, it talks about the UX3 beta at the bottom, with a link to a Vimeo video advertising what’s new in the beta. The video on Vimeo was uploaded in 2016. There hasn’t been any updates to the site since then and there are no changelogs found. Is UX3 still in beta then? In the video, the founder mentioned that Throttle Pro will be more expensive post beta. However, the price for Pro at $99 remained unchanged – this is comparing the price mentioned on Product Hunt 2 years ago VS the price listed on the official website.
The only thing I’m interested about is the “Instant Forwarding” feature. I subscribe to a lot of Daily Deal type emails, e.g. Groupon. If I buy something on Groupon, I want to receive my order confirmation etc. I don’t want it to be packaged into a digest, which makes it hard to find among the hundreds of other daily deal spammy emails. I only want important order receipts/confirmations to be sent to my actual inbox. There is no trial or enough information about this and the only thing I can find is a comment on Product Hunt from 1 month ago (mentioned above), stating that it has been temporarily disabled.
Finally, the Free version of Throttle, mentioned by the owner at least 2~3 times on Product Hunt, is no where to be found on the official site.
It really makes me wonder why there is even a deal for a lifetime account atm. Usually, good products that are selling well don’t need to put out these types of deals to generate revenue.
All these points are concerning and had their been more transparency and more reviews/information provided, it would be so much better for everyone.
Hi Ricky-
Thanks so much for this feedback. I was unaware of their difficulties. I’ve sent them messages in the past and received answers, but now that you mention it, there was a delay in them getting back to me. I haven’t had a problem with the service and you can always find the messages you need by going into your dashboard via the mobile app or via browser on desktop. Maybe that would solve your problems but I would agree with your assessment that spending $99 is risky. I’d suggest trying the $4.99 version for a month and see how it goes for you. Good luck!
I’ve purchased the $99 lifetime deal on Stacksocial (because they offer refund within 15 days, so I was willing to risk it). Throttle Pro is terrible. UX3 beta is still in beta. None of the features in the beta are available. Instant Forwarding, a feature that has been available to the Pro version since it came out, does NOT work. There are 2 ways to setup Instant Forwarding. One on the category itself and one that applies to everything. Neither works, which means I needed to manually forward emails sitting in Throttle to my account.
I ended up getting a refund and just went back to using Bulc Club. Completely free and works way better than Throttle.
Here’s what I received from Josh at MindSense, owners of Throttle:
Throttle is certainly still being supported, though Mindsense (the company owning Throttle) is also utilizing resources to build a newer model of the fan-favorite ‘Mail Pilot’ email application. Due to this divide in resources, development of the promised features in Throttle has been much slower than we, or our customers, anticipated – for that we apologize. However, current demand for Mail Pilot 3 absolutely outweighed customer demand for the promised Throttle features, and in order for us to continue developing all of our products (Throttle especially), we need to release this new product to attain the necessary financial support to our business model. Read the reasoning about business model pricing structures from Alex’s blog post here.
As for customer service issues, we understand there has been a severe lack in response and wait times, though our customer support team has reorganized and is now better prepared to be prompt on all issues brought forth by our customers. You should absolutely see an improvement in that area over the coming days and weeks.
To summarize, Throttle is indeed still alive, and we do expect to continue its development into the future. We apologize for the lack of feature releases, but rest assured they are still being worked on.
This product is a very expensive scam. I have been subscribed for a year at nearly $60 and then it was auto renewed withou my consent. There are no extensions in Safari or Chrom. I have never received and daily, weekly, monthly or yearly digest. When I try to log into their site they decline my password yet provide no means to change the password. Josh has replied twice to my concerns promising to resolve my problem. However that is all they are promises with no progress toward fulfillment. I have request to remove my subscription and refund the auto renewal subscription I did not agree to. So far I have heard nothing. This developer should not be in business as I have said at the start I believe it to be a scam. It is me intention to dispute this auto deduction with my bank if I don’t receive my requested refund.
Hi Christopher-
I’m very sorry you had this experience. I always receive a helpful response when I reach out to their customer service, and I’ve been happily using the service for many years. It’s true I’ve experienced a few hiccups, as they are a startup, but the service has saved me so much time and effort that it’s been worth working through it with them. But I thought it only fair to post your experience as well. Thanks for reading.
Christopher,
We’re terribly sorry to hear of your frustrations with our product and customer service. We were not made aware of many of the issues provided here, and were working diligently on the issues discussed. As a small team, we do our best to satisfy all customer inquiries in a timely manner. Technical issues often take a little while longer for us to effectively resolve, though that’s still no excuse for your dissatisfaction, and for that we apologize.
If any other site members have any issues like the one’s provided by Christopher, or have any other feedback about the product and its features, please send them to [email protected]. Reaching resolutions is a collaborative process; in order to successfully fix problems and improve the product, we need to work together! The opinions and feedback from our customers mean the world to us, and helps us build Throttle into the application you all deserve.
Thank you,
Josh, Throttle Customer Service Rep
Nearly another year gone by (or more than two, since this article was written), I am still interested in this product, but it seems, there is absolutely no Progress:
Website still mentioned the Beta UX3 from 2016
The Mail Pilot 3 Website still mentioned a Pre-Subscription
To bad. I could really use an App like this, but it feels more and more like Scam or – to be more precise – like a company in trouble with not enough manpower to hold the grip on one Project. And even 99€ is too much money to throw onto a lost concept. 🙁
I’m sorry you’re still having trouble. It works just fine for me. Try bulc-club.com. It’s a similar service although I don’t have any experience with it myself. Good luck!
Thank you for the shout-out, Maura. Bulc Club (www.bulc.club) provides unlimited free email forwarders, spam filtering, and a host of other features absolutely free. We’d love for you to give us a try and let us know what you think.