Azigo takes email advertisements and puts them into a beautiful stream instead of your inbox

Chances are that you’ve got a load of filtered or trashed email messages from commercial outlets like Groupon or your favorite local electronics store. Those emails, which we often look at as spam, sit there until we select all -> delete once more. But Azigo thinks that, if we could view them at our leisure and get them out of our inbox, we’d actually use them.

Azigo is trying to solve what it calls “the paradox of commercial email”. It’s like having a private party where everyone with your address can show up uninvited. It’s not that you don’t want to see those people, but you want to do so on your own terms. So Azigo is giving you a “commercial” email address and then placing those emails into a Pinterest-style display for your browsing pleasure.

The fact is that some emails are beautifully-designed, and they sometimes contain a wealth of valuable information. But we get so annoyed with seeing them that we often skip over them. However, if they were presented to you on your own terms, where you could browse them as you please, you might actually put them to use. That’s why Azigo takes every email that you get to your @azigo.com email address and puts them into a visual stream for you to browse.

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But it’s not just browsing. Azigo has teamed up with the guys from PowerInbox to allow you to view and interact with the emails without any additional plugins. Making things even easier, you can automatically forward emails (a la TripIt) to your azigo.com email address and they’ll appear in your stream without ever hitting your personal inbox.

I like what the team is doing, but its sheer numbers concern me somewhat. It’s a team of 8 well-seasoned veterans who have thus far put out a product that doesn’t seem like it should take 8 well-seasoned veterans to create. Time will tell, of course, what Azigo eventually does with that sort of power behind it, but the concern has to be raised.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that thus far has paid off well for both Azigo’s users and the brands that are appearing within the created streams. Facing facts, we’ve all handed over an email address that we perhaps regretted later. Azigo might be a solution to a very first-world problem, but anything that makes my inbox a little bit cleaner while giving me access to information I might actually use is a big win in my book.

➤ Azigo

Image: AFP/Getty Images