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.
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.
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.
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.
Show off your spam free lifestyle by pimping Boxbe’s new widget on your blog.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We get praise and love from our adoring fans on a regular basis, but one consistent request is to make getting email from real humans easier.
Keeping your Guest List up to date isn’t an easy job. When friends change jobs or their ISPs, their email addresses change with them.
Boxbe helps you get email from people who matter to you. The problem is, you don’t always know who is going to matter to you.
Today, I’m happy to announce a feature to make using Boxbe a lot easier.
Who are your friends? If you are like me, I have hundreds of contacts on my Boxbe Guest List. Some of them are email addresses from companies like Amazon or Facebook.
The bulk of my Guest List, however, is composed of friends, family and co-workers. We’ve consolidated this group of people into a group called “Friends.”
So, why should you designate someone as a friend?
If you mark someone as a friend on your Guest List and they are a Boxbe member, anyone that they have designated as a friend can email you as well.
This takes a little of the difficulty of having to update your Guest List to ensure delivery of messages from your friends. You don’t have to mark them as a friend and you can block them if it’s someone you don’t want to hear from.
As an example, this is what happens when I add Mark as a friend.
When I add Mark as a friend, all of his friends can then email me without taking a test or paying a fee. If we have a lot of mutual friends, and he updates a change in their information first, I won’t have to.
We’re adhering to the proverb that many hands make light work.
While we’re extending your Guest List to your friends, we won’t show others a list of who you have made a friend. The only way someone will know who your friends are is if they email them. Any email that you receive from a Friend of a Friend will be marked as such.
Here is how it will look in Yahoo! Mail:
We’re pretty happy with what we’ve released, but please let us know if there is anything we can do to make it better.
We’re constantly thinking of ways to make Boxbe easier to use and think this will help you get emails from people who matter to you most.
Boxbe CEO, Thede Loder will be presenting at AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC. The conference is a
“two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.”
Thede will be presenting our vision of the future of email during the “CEO Showcase - Web Services and Measurement” session at 11:10 Tuesday morning. Thede will be joined by Boxbe COO, Corbett Barr and EVP of Corporate Development, Mark Benerofe. If you are at the conference, please say hi to Thede, Corbett and Mark.
Join our growing team!
If you are a creative thinker who thrives in a fast-paced, market-driven startup environment, we want to talk to you. Located in San Francisco, we currently have openings to join the team which is responsible for designing and building our industry-leading technology.
Boxbe is looking for a .NET C# engineer with Microsoft Outlook programming experience. Boxbe has developed a client-side version of our e-mail management system which integrates with Outlook as an add-in. This developer will be supporting an initial release of code and continuing to improve and extend on the original framework.
Details after the link -
Read the rest of this entry »
We launched Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail back in the fall. Here is a quick overview of how it works.
No need to come to the Boxbe Web site to view messages on your Waiting List. We’ll move all your unwanted messages into a new folder in your existing Yahoo! Mail account.
Your Boxbe Waiting List folder will contain all the messages from guests you haven’t yet approved.
We’ve added the Boxbe Junk Score to the subject line of all messages in your Waiting List. Sorting by subject will help you find messages that are less likely to be junk.
This makes it easier to find messages from senders that you might want to add to your Guest List. Additionally, you can easily search messages in the Waiting List using Yahoo! Mail’s search tool.
If you decide a message isn’t junk, clicking the “Approve” link from within the message in the Waiting List adds the sender to your Guest List and moves the message into your Yahoo! Mail inbox.
Finally, when you send an email to a new friend, you have the option of adding them automatically to your Guest List. The idea here is that you don’t want people you’ve emailed to have take a test or pay a fee to email you back.
Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail is easy to set up and it’s absolutely free.
(Not a Yahoo! Mail user? Boxbe works with Gmail and a plugin for Microsoft Outlook is currently in beta testing.)
Need help getting up to speed on Gmail? This video from Ask the PC Guide can help.
The video covers creating labels, filters, shortcuts, managing multiple email accounts and more.
Remember, you can use Boxbe for your Gmail account by signing up here.
[Video via Lifehacker]
We hope you are having a relaxing holiday this year knowing that your email is protected by Boxbe.
We’re off for a few days, but don’t worry, we’ve got elves watching all of your email :-).
Wishing you the best this holiday season.
We’ll see you in 2008.
Two terms we spent a little time talking about this year made the New York Times 2007 Buzzword List. The Times takes the last Sunday of every year to review the year. Now, there are a lot of end of the year lists, but the Buzzword list is unique, fun and informative.
Bacn, as you recall, is “Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.”
Congrats to the Podcamp Pittsburgh folks for making “Bacn” one of 2007’s top buzzwords.
Email Bankruptcy is something most Boxbe users won’t ever have to declare, but we can’t guard against friends, family and colleagues expecting a response to every message they send you.
What you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response.
Lawrence Lessig and Fred Wilson both famously declared email bankruptcy in the last couple of years. We wish them a better, more productive email life in 2008.
Other tech related terms from this year - crowdsourcing, life streaming, tumblelog, lolcat and one for Mark (our VP of Corp Dev and former CNN producer), I-reporter.
Feature: Getting Things Done with labels and filters in Gmail 2.0 - Geek.com
Joel Evans over at Geek.com details how to use the new features of Gmail to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) system with Gmail.
New URL features can make your e-mail productive again - Ars Technica
New linking feature in Mac OS X Mail and in Gmail documented by Ars Technica and John Gruber.
Easily Transfer Emails from Hotmail to Gmail Via Outlook Connector - Digital Inspiration Technology Guide
How to move your Hotmail email to Gmail via Outlook.
Gmail Tip: Import Messages into Gmail via IMAP - Dracoware
"Here’s a quick overview of how to get all of your old emails into Gmail as painlessly as possible (and one way that preserves dates!)."
NOTE: Boxbe is discontinuing support for removing Boxbe for Gmail in this way. Please follow the directions at the bottom of this post to remove Boxbe for Gmail.
Edited February 4, 2008
Recently, we’ve had a little bug that made it difficult to remove Boxbe protection from Gmail accounts. The bug has been fixed, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell everyone how to disable Boxbe for your email account (particularly Gmail). We know some people may want to discontinue service after trying it and we’ve made it easy to enable and disable accounts.
We’ve added a filter to Gmail to selectively forward email to Boxbe and send email from senders on your Guest List back to Gmail. You can turn this on and off on the site by going to the Boxbe Dashboard and click “Disable” next to the email address you want to disable (this works with the other addresses, too).
Next, you’ll be taken to a screen that you’ll have to enter in your Gmail password.
If for some reason, that doesn’t work, click through to the next page to get the details on how to turn Boxbe for Gmail off in Gmail.
To turn off Boxbe for Gmail manually, follow these steps.
First, go to your settings from within Gmail.
Second, once inside your Gmail Settings, click “Filters.”
Finally, find the Boxbe filter (this will be the one that says “Do this: Forward to username@boxbe.com, Skip Inbox, Delete it”
Once you’ve removed the filter, Boxbe won’t be protecting your Gmail account anymore.
You can always re-enable the account on your Boxbe Dashboard.
With the recent relaunch of our site, I thought this might be an opportune moment to better explain what Boxbe is and how we can help you.
Email is an essential tool that we use in all areas of our lives, personal and professional. Yet it has not kept pace with the way people communicate.
Email as we know it is broken. It hasn’t changed with the times and many people claim to be abandoning email and young people aren’t adopting it.
Boxbe is a service that lets you easily create an email guest list so that you can make sure you receive email messages from people who matter to you.
A Boxbe Guest List works like lists on popular social networking sites - it protects and guarantees the delivery of email from friends, family, co-workers or even entire domains.
When you first sign up, Boxbe scans your existing email folders and address book to create a Guest List that includes all the people you’ve recently and frequently emailed. The Guest List is live and dynamic and automatically includes new people you want to receive email from, so your friends are already included
When you receive an email from someone you have not already pre-approved, you can opt to approve the sender. She will then be added to your Boxbe Guest List. We are adapting email for the social networking generation.
Inboxes are filled with unwanted messages, making it hard to find the things you do want. Or sometimes important messages are marked as junk by an over zealous spam filter.
Boxbe cleans up your inbox and guarantees emails from people who matter, and stops those that are unwanted.
Boxbe is designed for the millions of email users who want better control of their email. Boxbe works with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Outlook.
Boxbe for Your Domain is in beta testing – it and more services will be rolled out in 2008!
Ever miss an important email because it got marked as spam?
Boxbe ranks incoming messages from 1-10, and color codes them. The lower the number, the better the message.
Green messages mean likely good, yellow means caution and red means bad. If your Aunt Hilda just changed her email address, she will likely get a low score marked green. However, a sender that isn’t who they claim to be will get a high score marked red.
Boxbe empowers you to choose which people or businesses can reach you. Anyone who isn’t on your Guest List will receive a request to verify their message before it is delivered to your inbox. Legitimate marketers who want to reach you have the option of paying a small fee that you set so that they can get their message through to you.
Unverified messages are held in your Waiting List for you to review, and approve or decline at anytime.
Boxbe helps you sift through the barrage of email you receive on a daily basis. We’re here to uncomplicate your inbox and help you get to the messages you want to receive.
We’ve gotten a few questions about adding domains to your Guest List and thought having a how to blog post might answer other questions folks may have.
A domain name is the bit after the “@” in your email address. For example, in the email address, randy@boxbe.com, boxbe.com is the domain name.
Adding a domain name can make it easy for groups of people (like co-workers) to email you without getting an email invitation back.
Other examples might include emails you get from a company who’s emails you might always want to receive. I buy a lot of goods from Amazon.com and also have an affiliate account, so I have the Amazon.com domain approved.
It’s easy to add a domain name to your Guest List. Adding a domain name is just like adding a regular email address. From your Approved Guest List, just type in a the domain name you would like to approve and click “Add.”
Alternatively, you can list domains when you import a larger list of contacts on the import contacts page.
