Boxbe Blog

Boxbe will experience a bit of downtime tomorrow, September 30, 2009, as we need to upgrade our servers to increase capacity.

We’ve experienced unprecedented growth over the last six months as more people have joined Boxbe than ever before. Additionally, we’ve noted an increase in unwanted email and spam, which we diligently remove from your inbox. We’ll be better able to handle all of our new users and email volume after our upgrades.

We anticipate that this downtime will take most of the day, starting at around 10am PDT. You do not need to do anything. Our service will resume as soon as our servers are back online. Additionally, when Boxbe comes back up, we will process the mail that we missed while we were down.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for using Boxbe.

Here’s a little video we did to better describe how Boxbe can help you say goodbye to email overload. Please share it with your friends!

This video can also be seen on our How It Works page.

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to everyone who has been using Boxbe over the last year. The blog has been quiet for a while, but I wanted to let you know we’ve got some exciting announcements coming soon.

Also, we periodically update our Twitter feed with answers to questions that folks might have and letting people know about issues that crop up from time to time.

Follow Boxbe on Twitter

Hope you had a great holiday and we’re looking forward to a helping your tame your inbox mess in 2009!

[photo by jurvetson]

Thede, Thomas and I are heading to down to Sunnyvale tomorrow for Yahoo! Hack Day. Hopefully, we’ll be hacking together the future of Boxbe while we are there.

We use the Yahoo! Mail API to make Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail work and we’ll be adding their Address Book API very soon so that we’re not using that not-so-nice anti-pattern we keep hearing about. We’re hoping to learn more about it and other APIs that Yahoo! is opening up.

Say Hi

If you are going to Hack Day and want to meet up, send me a note at randy@boxbe.com. Hope to see you there.

You can see the video that Yahoo! put together for their Hack Day. Read the rest of this entry »

photo from Flickr user, kjunstorm

I go to a few tech conferences every year, but in general, my favorite one is Gnomedex. It’s a great group of people and always an interesting set of speakers.

This year was especially nice as randomly, a woman walked up to me and says, “I love you guys.” I was a little startled at first, but then I realized she was one of the folks that follows Boxbe’s Twitter feed, An Bui. It seems we’d made her pretty happy with our Outlook plugin and how it killed spam from her inbox.

I was pretty stoked to get a little adulation for our service and remembered that after a recent survey we had received lots of great feedback about how we’d helped other people tame their inboxes, too.

Here are some quotes from the survey (which happened before we released Outlook). Thanks everyone for your kind words.

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail

“My ~10 year old Yahoo account is manageable once again.” – George B.

“I like that it gives me a chance to stop accepting emails from companies I don’t use any longer.”- Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I like this service because it is different from anything else I have experienced. I want others to have the same opportunity.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I was about to abandon my yahoo account. now i don’t have to. thanks!” – Sharon S.

“I think Boxbe is awesome!” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“Can’t get any easier to use.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“Thanks for fixing my Yahoo! I’d given up on using it about a year ago, and set it to vacation response. Now all those business cards are usable again. ;)” – Joseph K.

“You’ve got a big fan, and one who will share the information with friends soon.”- Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I am a supporter, and I think your stuff generally works.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“It catches the rest of the stuff Yahoo spam doesn’t so that my Inbox is spam-free.” – Tabatha L.

Public Email Address

“This is the most important email advance since Gmail in my book. It’s an entirely disruptive technology that serves as an electronic gatekeeper. [yes, you may use that as a quote]” – Boxbe for Yahoo! and Boxbe Public Email user

“There’s no more worry about attaching an email somewhere and having it harvested. That’s awesome.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! and Boxbe Public Email user

“It is a great email service to use as a public address.” – Boxbe Public Email user

General

“It does a great job of filtering my mail.” – Anna R.

“I’ve been happy with the results that I’ve noticed and recommended it for those same reasons.- Richard S.

“The program has eliminated alot of scrolling through unwanted emails just to get to the emails that I need to review.” – Patricia B.

“I really like it and how it allows me to define what is and isn’t spam.” – Brent C.

“I think it’s a cool service. A service that needs a little work, but cool enough to tell others about it.” – Ronnie M.
“Everyone needs this.” – Cindi G.

“I think it is wonderful.” – Darlene B.

“I don’t know of any other service that does this, and it seems like such a perfect solution.”- Robin L.

“You’ve tamed the red tide of junk mail in here. I see the real results in 1.5 days, literally within a day and a half, all the mail I want is in my in-box, and the stuff I don’t is in the pending folder.”- Andre L.

We are still experiencing a service outage for a number of our members and are still working with Yahoo! Mail to fix the problem.

We have fixed a problem for users whose accounts are being enabled (and subsequently disabled again) receiving multiple notifications regarding the service going up and down.

If you have received numerous messages regarding the status of your account, you shouldn’t receive any more until we’ve resolved this issue.

Sorry for the delay in reactivating Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail, but rest assured we are tirelessly working on getting service working again.

On Friday, we experienced a service outage for some of our Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail users that is still affecting users today. While the service is still working for most, an issue with the Yahoo! Mail API is preventing us from reinstating service completely.

We are actively working with Yahoo! to reinstate Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail for the affected users.

We’re terribly sorry for any inconvenience that this may be causing you, but rest assured we will have the service up and and running as soon as humanly possible.

We will keep you posted on the Boxbe Blog as we get to the bottom of this issue.

We’ve been busy here at Boxbe HQ making improvements to our service to make Boxbe easier to use and better integrated into your email workflow.

Here are some of the features we’ve just launched:

Always allow approved guests

Wondering why some messages from approved senders weren’t making it to your inbox? The new system allows messages from approved senders even if they fail authentication.

A simpler Guest List to make your life easier.

Auto Allow and Auto Block

Allow messages that have a low junk score to go directly to your inbox, and banish the ones with a high junk score from even showing up in your Waiting List. Save time – don’t worry about emails that are most and least likely to be good – Boxbe does the work for you.

Go to your threshold sliders now!

Universal Guest List

Use Boxbe’s convenient list of retailers, mailing lists, banks, social networks and other automated senders (no marketing or advertising emails, of course). It’s one more way Boxbe helps you save time.

Courtesy Notices are now optional

Many of you told us you don’t want to send Courtesy Notices to people not on your Guest List. They are now optional and they give you more control.

Choose who receives courtesy notices here.

Feedback?

Thanks for using Boxbe and we hope you like our new features. We love your feedback and we live on it. Please let us know what you think by responding to this email or emailing us at support@boxbe.com.

As we’re winding down for a 4th of July here in the US, it seemed like a good time to mention some of the recent articles written about us. Here are a few recent mentions that Boxbe has had in the blogosphere and by Fox Business News and the gray lady.

Struggling to Evade the Email Tsunami – The New York Times
Boxbe got a brief mention in this article from Randall Stross about people that are trying to get out from under their excessive email. No solutions for all the problems yet, but we’re trying :-).

Banish Those Pesky Spam and Phishing E-mails That Clog Up Your Inbox – Fox Business News
Fox Business New writer Donna Fuscaldo plays up Boxbe’s leveraging social networking to combat spam and phishing. “The free service, which works with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Outlook, lets users create a list of approved people who can send e-mail, similar to how instant messaging and social networking works.”

A Tale of Two Spammers and a Nice Solution
Now, here’s an interesting use of Boxbe to measure how many emails are sent from a couple of legitimate marketers. Giving out your Boxbe Public Email Address is demonstrated perfectly in this personal account by George Bounacos.

photo from flickr user Mr Magoo ICU

You may have noticed some changes to the way our junk rating system works in your Waiting List in the last week. Messages that were put in your Waiting List between May 24th and May 31st may have a higher junk rating than you might have expected. NOTE: this should have only affected Yahoo! Mail and Public Email Address users. Boxbe for Outlook users were not affected by this change.

We have since modified our rating systems to behave more like they did before the changes that occurred on the 24th.

Why did this happen?

We had a service outage last Saturday that resulted in a necessary upgrade to the machines that apply junk ratings to incoming email. Upon upgrading those machines to a new version of our software, some of the tweaks that we had been making to our junk ratings got pushed out before they were fully baked.

We think we have gotten everything back to normal, but we may be making tweaks over the next several days.

Feedback please

Let us know if your junk ratings aren’t what you would expect them to be and stay tuned for some big improvements to the way Boxbe handles email.

Email us at support@boxbe.com.

Today, we’re announcing that our Boxbe for Outlook add-in is available to everyone for download. While it still has some rough edges, unlike a lot of other betas, we’ve been testing this add-in both internally and with a sizable number of beta testers for several months.

What is Boxbe for Outlook?

We’ve encapsulated all the functionality of the Boxbe website into an easy to use plugin for use with Microsoft Outlook.

Following is a little introduction to our latest product, Boxbe for Outlook.

Automatic Guest List Creation

The Boxbe for Outlook plugin looks through your list of contacts, past emails and email messages that you have sent to others, to create your Guest List quickly and get you started using Boxbe.

Once you have created your Guest List, email from people on your Guest List will go directly to your Inbox as they have before, while email from people that are not on your Guest List will go to your boxbe Waiting List folder.

Waiting List and Junk Ratings

If someone emails you that is not on your Guest List, that message is sent to your Waiting List folder and Boxbe determines how likely that message is to be spam.

Messages are rated on a scale from 1 to 10 on their likelihood that they are spam. Messages that score low are less likely to be spam and messages that score high are more likely to be spam.

Boxbe Junk Ratings quickly separate the good from the bad.

Fast Setup, Easy to Use

Depending on the size of your list of contacts and mailboxes, setup usually takes a couple of minutes. Once you are set up, adding new senders to your Guest List is a snap. We add a toolbar to Outlook that gives you quick access to the tools you’ll use after setup.

Approve Senders
Clicking “Add Sender” will add the sender of the email that you are currently reading to your Guest List. Adding to your Guest List ensures that that person can easily email you again.

Approve Domains
If you get a lot of email from a particular domain (example: your company or an organization that you belong to), you can quickly add the domain to your Guest List as well.

Protect multiple email addresses

One of the best things about Boxbe for Outlook is that you can protect any or all of the email addresses that you access via Microsoft Outlook. The Guest List that you create for one email address will work across all the email accounts that you choose for Boxbe to protect.

Get Boxbe for Outlook

You can get Boxbe for Outlook by signing up for Boxbe or adding an email address to your existing Boxbe account here.

System requirements:
Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007
Windows Vista or Windows XP

We hope you like the new plugin but if you have any difficulty using Boxbe for Outlook or have any questions, email us support@boxbe.com.

Update 2:13 PM We are back up. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Update – we are taking a bit longer than anticipated. Please stand by.

Starting at 12:45 pm PDT. We’ll be back soon.

Last night we had a service outage for our Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail service. After diagnosing the problem with the good folks down at Yahoo!, we have fixed the issues that caused the outage.

Essentially, due to a rapid increase in Boxbe users, Boxbe was shut out of using Yahoo! Mail’s API. Fortunately, we devised a way to make our service work better with Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail re-enabled Boxbe to access your account early this afternoon and the service should be up and running right now.

Thanks to our friends down at Yahoo! that helped us get Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail up and running again.

It will take us some time to catch up with all the email in your account, but we anticipate that everything will be running smoothly and back to normal in the next day or so.

We’re really sorry for the interruption in Boxbe service and hope that you didn’t receive too much unwanted mail in the mean time.

The silver lining to the service outage is that it gave us an opportunity adopt new practices to scale Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail to make our service available to even more users.

Update 3: 3:40 PM May 6, 2008
We’re back!!

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail is up and running. We’re sorry again for this inconvenience. We’ll post a further explanation later and measures that we are taking to avoid future outages.

Read the rest of this entry »

We moved from our Potrero digs a few months ago to our new “convenient to public transit” location downtown a couple of months ago and we thought it was time to have a little party.

I took a lot of pictures at the event and I’m sharing them below. The new office is indeed warmer as a result. Thanks to everyone who came and joined in the fun.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Full Set on Flickr

By popular demand, we’ve released a widget to help real people reach you from your blog.

Using the widget is really great for me as I meet a lot of people both in the “real world” and online. Ideally, I’d like anyone to be able to reach me easily. For non-Boxbe members, posting your email address on a blog is practically begging to buried in spam.

Fortunately, Boxbe members don’t have these concerns.

Where can I get it?

You can get a personalized widget for yourself on our email addresses page.

NOTE: This widget should work with any Javascript enabled blogging system.

We’ve tested this widget with Wordpress (self installed, not Wordpress.com) and Blogger and it works great in both places. We will be creating a simplified version of this widget for folks using blog systems that don’t allow Javascript on their sites soon.

Download it now

Show off your spam free lifestyle by pimping Boxbe’s new widget on your blog.

Get the widget

A big thank you to our friends over at Yahoo! Developer Network for making Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail an Editor’s Pick in the Yahoo! Gallery today.

Yahoo! Gallery, in case you didn’t know, is the site that Yahoo! uses to show off sites and services that use Yahoo! technologies. As you all know, Boxbe integrates tightly with Yahoo! Mail, making it so you don’t have to leave Yahoo! Mail to use the Boxbe service.

You may not know that we use the awesome Yahoo! Mail API to power Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail. Without the API, Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail wouldn’t be so nicely integrated with Yahoo! Mail.

What’s an API?

Sometimes living in the world of developers, we forget that most normal folks don’t know what an API is. Wikipedia’s definition is

“An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.”

Ok, that probably didn’t help much…

Essentially, an API is the way we access your Yahoo! Mail account with Yahoo!’s (and your) blessing. We use tools Yahoo! has built for people outside the company to enhance their existing services.

The folks at Yahoo! know that they can’t be all things to all people so they let companies like ours further individualize their services.

Yahoo! Gallery Pick

We’re happy that our Yahoo! Mail product has been made a pick on the Yahoo! Gallery.

Thanks again, Yahoo!

We’ve got a bunch of new features in the pipeline, but I almost forgot to mention some refinements we’ve made to the site recently.

Email Addresses page

We’ve made it a lot easier to update email addresses that you are using with Boxbe. By going to your Email Addresses page, you can maintain, enable, disable or add new email addresses to be protected by Boxbe.

To protect a new email address, you can either add it at the top of the Email Addresses page

or from your Dashboard page.

Once you type the email address in, you’ll be guided through the process to protect that email address using Boxbe.

We hope this makes it easier to add email addresses to your Boxbe account. If you have any problems or difficulties with this or any other feature, send email to support@boxbe.com.

I’m hanging in Vancouver, Canada at the awesome social media and blogging conference Northern Voice conference.

Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference that’s being held at the Forestry Sciences Centre, 2424 Main Mall, UBC main campus, Vancouver, Canada on February 22-23, 2008. This is the 4th annual incarnation of this event, see the 2005, 2006 and 2007 websites for previous information.

The thing that makes Northern Voice great is the people. Last year, both the speakers and the attendees were incredible and I can’t wait to catch up with some of those folks again this year. I learned a lot, shared a lot and made some new friends and acquaintances.

Come talk to me about cleaning up your inbox with Boxbe’s social anti-spam tools or just to say hi.

Our VP of Corporate Development (and all around nice guy), Mark Benerofe was briefly interviewed today on American Public Media’s Marketplace program.

Now, he wasn’t talking about Boxbe on Marketplace, but we love Mark so, we thought it was worth mentioning here.

The story, What ever happened to Netscape?, is on today’s episode Marketplace. Mark was quoted because he was around back then (ok, I was too, but Mark was actually working online) and worked at some places like Prodigy and Sony Online.

The story gives a history of Netscape which is intertwined pretty tightly with the history of the web. Netscape is largely gone, but lives on in the form of Firefox, the browser of choice for many of us today.

You’ll need Real Player to listen to the segment, but can download an MP3 of the whole show here. The story starts at about 13 minutes in.

Read