Boxbe Blog

Do we dislike email marketers? This is a question that I’ve received numerous times. Actually, we started this service to help email marketers as much as helping consumers.

Marco Lopez is a good friend of mine. He makes an honest living as an email marketer. He’s worked at a lot of great companies including eBay, Expedia and most recently Farecast, a great new travel site.

His job is to figure out the best kind of email to send his customers. All of the people on his list have said that it was ok to send them email. People like email from Marco. He tells them about deals in places they frequently travel. He tells them that prices are going to go up soon. He tells them it might be a good idea to wait a couple of days before buying a ticket.

What he doesn’t want to do is irritate you. He doesn’t want to send you emails that you don’t want. But his business is tricky because he only knows certain things about you. And unfortunately, he isn’t psychic.

Ultimately, if Marco sends you an email that you want to read and you buy something, everybody wins. If Marco sends you an email that you don’t want to read, and it’s irritating, everybody loses.

Email marketers are doing their best to send you the stuff you want and better yet, the stuff you’re going to buy anyway. He wants you as a customer. I want to be his customer. And that’s part of why we’re here. To help Marco help you (and me).

[NOTE: The Direct Marketing Association has put together a nice set of guidelines and best practices for direct and email marketers. Most legitimate marketers follow these rules.]

For most of my career, I’ve had a salaried job that paid a set amount no matter how long I worked. The agreement is simple, you work 40+ hours a week, get paid a consistent weekly wage, but also receive benefits like health care, stock options, etc. With salaried positions, I never really thought about my hourly rate, and better yet, the actual dollar value of my time.

Recently, I started consulting, which tends to pay hourly, so my frame of mind changed. Any hour that I wasn’t working, I also wasn’t getting paid. What is my time worth? I started thinking more and more about the value of my time and figuring out the best ways to spend it.

What is the cost of your attention?

I did a little non-scientific study with a few friends and talked about their email usage. I asked, “How much time do you spend during the day getting rid of unwanted email?” The answers hovered around 5 to 10 minutes. So how much does wasting 5-10 minutes a day actually cost?

If you expand the low end (5 minutes) out over a year, the people in my non-scientific study spent about 21 hours a year hitting the delete key.

5 minutes x 5 days x 50 weeks = 21 hours

Now if your wages fall at the 2005 national average of $36,952 (according the Social Security Administration), manually processing that unwanted email cost you $384.93.

($36,952 a year / 50 weeks / 40 hours) x 21 hours = $384.93.  

To put that into perspective, $384.93 is enough to buy a top end iPod, with tax. If you make more than $37,000 a year or spend more than 5 minutes a day deleting email, your cost rises accordingly.

Now, I realize that this isn’t money that is coming out of most people’s pockets. As a salaried employee, however, this is time coming out of your day.

Given that, I suppose the real question is, what would you rather do with those 21 hours?

photo by Flickr member cmiper

Last Friday, we pushed a site redesign for the Boxbe main site. While no major functionality has changed, we think this makes it a little easier to find the things you’re looking for and is a bit easier on the eyes.

If you have comments about the new design or see any problems, send me email at randy@boxbe.com or comment below.

Mike Gunderloy, over at Web Worker Daily, has some great tips for organizing your email. From figuring out your organizational style, cool tools to use, to setting up rules, this article will help you take email organization to the next level.

Read

As you might imagine, we think about email a lot here at Boxbe. Email consumes a lot of everyone’s time, so there are always ways to get more efficient at getting through it. We’ll be sharing our favorite email tips on the blog from time to time. This first set is from the top notch productivity blog, Lifehacker.

• Backing up Gmail with Thunderbird
  
• How to set up a smart Out-of-Office auto-reply with Gmail
• 8 killer Thunderbird plug-ins
• Outlook Tip: Send an email without touching the mouse
• Mailredirect - Thunderbird plugin

We think that Boxbe and bloggers are a natural fit. We like the idea that people can post their Boxbe address on their blogs without fear of unwanted emails. I love getting email from readers and I imagine many other bloggers would like to be reachable as well.

Here’s a quick roundup of bloggers talking about Boxbe.

• Cristian Eslava (en Espanol)
• MacBros Place
• Digital Guides, Hacks and Tips
• Accidental Events, Dreams and Travels

Thanks everyone! We hope you love the service.

Now, if you’re reading this, chances are that you wanted a Gmail account, you already have one. But just in case your grandparents, children or your cat doesn’t have an address at Gmail yet, Google finally dropped the invite-only system and opened Gmail to anyone interested.

With its 2.8 gigabytes of space, full keyboard interface, and POP access, we’re big fans of Google’s free Gmail service. Google opening up the service to the world is a monumental occasion for the Mountain View company.

Googlers were none to shy to let us know how they feel about the launch. “We have already made e-mail better for everyone in the world,” Google’s Coleman boasted.”

I can’t say I disagree.

Gmail

Read
[via Lifehacker]

In an earlier post, I mentioned a spammer who was phishing getting convicted and facing up to a 101 years in prison as a result. But what exactly is phishing?

Photo by Flickr user thermodynamix

Wikipedia defines phishing as

“a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures.”

In a nutshell, phishing is something criminals do to trick people into giving them sensitive information. The stolen information is then used by the criminal for further illicit activities.

Boxbe and phishing

So, what does Boxbe do about phishing? First, the only email that you receive when using Boxbe is from senders that you have approved, have passed a human test or have paid a fee. Second, we use two emerging industry standards, SPF and DomainKeys to increase the likelihood that the sender isn’t spoofing or faking their email address.

Is it a 100% solution? No. Unfortunately, we can’t guard against all forms of social engineering or deception. What we can do is guard against emails from entering your inbox that make false claims as to their point of origin. The rest is up to you.

Learn more about phishing

We suggest that everyone educate themselves against phishing. Here are some great places to learn more about phishing:

• Microsoft - Recognizing phishing scams and fraudulent emails
• Tips from Fraud.org
• Paypal Security Center
• CNET - How to avoid phishing scams

Score one for the good guys.

photo by Flickr user assbach

Goodin, who was arrested last year, was found guilty of operating a sophisticated phishing scheme, the prosecutors said in the statement. As part of the scam, he sent e-mails posing as AOL’s billing department to trick people into giving up their credit card information, according to the statement. He then used the credit card data to make purchases, prosecutors said Tuesday.

While he won’t get a 101 years for just spamming, this case is a perfect example of how spam can be tremendously harmful to people.

Be careful out there.

Read

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking about all the features Boxbe has to offer, but today we’ll start with the public forwarding address.

Public Forwarding Address

Your Boxbe public forwarding address is a protected email address. A message sent to your public forwarding address is sent to your real inbox only if the sender:

1. is pre-approved or “whitelisted” by you,
2. passes a test, or
3. pays a fee.

You can share or publish your public forwarding address online without concern because of this protection. The forwarding email address is very handy if you own a blog, a MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube account and would like people to be able to reach you outside those accounts.

Email on Steroids

Since most people have existing email addresses at both home and work or school, you might be asking yourself, why do I need another email address? A Boxbe address isn’t meant to replace those addresses. It’s meant to enhance them.

Personally, I’d never put my Yahoo! or Gmail email address on the internet as it is likely to attract email that I don’t want. Boxbe’s public forwarding address provides a way for me to post my email address anywhere on the internet and not worry about unwanted email.

I use my Boxbe address when posting in online discussion groups or communities, posting to my blog or commenting on someone else’s. I also use my Boxbe address on MySpace and basically anywhere I want people to be able to reach me. Best of all, it’s a forwarding address, so the emails that I want will be delivered to my regular inbox.

Who should use the forwarding email address?

I’ve mentioned a few uses of the forwarding email address for social media sites (blogging, MySpace, discussion boards), but we realize that not everyone participates on those kinds of sites. Boxbe can protect anyone’s email address from unwanted email. Chances are, even if you’ve not posted your email address in a public place, you receive email that you don’t want.

At our core, we’re here to cut down on the email you don’t want to receive and encourage the email that you do want to receive.

Thede and Corbett were interviewed on Thursday last week by the CBS 47 team in Fresno. Check out the video below to get a brief overview of what we do here at Boxbe.

Read more at CBS 47.

As Thede described earlier, at it’s root, Boxbe is designed to protect your most valuable asset: your attention. While you might not think of your time as being valuable, imagine how you might spend your time rather than deleting unwanted email. The mind abounds with activities that are more fun and rewarding.

Sounds great, how does it work?

Nuts and bolts

Once you’ve joined Boxbe, you decide who can reach you by first uploading a list of pre-approved senders.

We’ve made it easy by integrating an email address import tool for your contacts from many different email providers and popular email applications.

When new people email you, depending on your preferences, they are sent a courtesy notice with the option of taking a test to prove that they are human or paying a fee to talk to you.

Non-humans (automated emails) won’t be able to reach you without paying a fee or being approved by you. When a sender takes a test or pays, you can approve them by simply clicking on the link in their message. Alternatively, you can visit your quarantine folder and approve them.

That’s it.

Boxbe sends you a periodic update telling you about the messages in your quarantine, so you’ll know if there is any email that you are missing. In addition, you can review your quarantine to approve new senders at any time.

We’ve talked a little about at the service, but what about the people that make it tick? For now, I’ll introduce myself and the two founders of the company, Thede and Corbett.

Randy Stewart

I’m Randy Stewart, a Product Manager here at Boxbe, which means I help design features for Boxbe and work with engineers to implement and launch those features. In addition, I’m writing this blog to let people know what’s happening with the service.

Here’s a little about me: I’ve been a product manager at Yahoo! Shopping, Product Manager at Epinions, the community of product review writers and I’ve consulted for numerous early stage internet companies.

Thede and I met back in 1995 while we both worked at Match.com. I was an intern there and he was a lead developer. We’ve been good friends ever since.

Please contact me if you have any questions about Boxbe or have any suggestions for features that you would like to see. You can reach me at randy@boxbe.com

Thede Loder

Hi, I’m Thede Loder, Co-founder and President of Boxbe. I’m excited about Boxbe because I believe we are enabling a revolutionary change in the world of email. I’m also happy to be building things again after a few years studying.

In 2004, I finished a grad program in Computer Science at Michigan. My focus there was on how to modify the rules that govern email so that email would be used more ‘efficiently’. By this I mean the economic notion of efficiency, where both a sender and a recipient of a message get positive value from it, and unwanted messages are discouraged and sent less frequently.

Prior to grad school, I helped build several Internet businesses. The first was Match.com in 1995, where I was the third technical employee. To launch and operate Match.com, we needed an application server, and since they didn’t exist at the time, we had to build one. In 1996, I co-founded Leverage Information Systems with two other engineers to help commercialize the technology. We eventually sold Leverage to Diamond Technology Partners, a strategic consulting firm, which is where I met my fellow co-founder, Corbett Barr.

Corbett Barr

Hi there. I’m Corbett Barr, Boxbe’s other co-founder (and COO). I use Boxbe every day, and I hope we can make it a must-have for you, too. My personal goal is to make a service that truly gives you control over your email communications in a way that is both easy and fun to use.

As Thede mentioned, he and I met at Diamond back in 2000, where I was a technology consultant. I spent about five years there helping big (Fortune 500 sized) clients make better use of technology. In addition to consulting, I’ve also worked as a software developer. My favorite job (by far), however, has been building the Boxbe service over the past year.

Look here for more details about how we plan to make email a better tool for all. If you have any questions or feedback about how we can make Boxbe better, feel free to write me at corbett@boxbe.com

Welcome to Boxbe! As President of the company, I want to officially welcome you to our new blog. This is a place where you’ll hear from many of the Boxbe team members (currently six of us) about what’s going on here, and other things we think you’ll find interesting.

If you’ve been following Boxbe thus far, you probably know that we launched the first beta of www.boxbe.com in November. Since then, we have been working hard to iron out the kinks and bring Boxbe closer to our vision.

What’s our vision exactly? Boxbe is (at its heart) a new kind marketplace. What you trade through Boxbe (or give away, the choice is yours), is “access to yourself”. For your work and personal correspondence, you can let access be free. For others, we help you set a price. Our goal is to give you control over your inbox, and through that, your time.

With your inbox cleaned up, you regain the breathing room to consider new relationships. There are companies who want to reach you, and many you would be happy to hear from. Boxbe helps you hear from the right ones. How? The payment you require is a form of screen. When advertisers are required to reimburse you for your attention, they have more reason to use your preferences to send something interesting.

We’re lining up some exciting advertisers who want to participate. They will become part of the Boxbe marketplace, and share our vision. We know it’s a lofty goal, but every revolution starts somewhere. This is where we can use your help.

In order to engage companies that you would want to hear from (and who would want to pay to reach you), we need a sizable member base. We’ll tell you more about how you can help in upcoming posts, but for starters, spread the word and tell your friends to use Boxbe!

Thanks again for checking us out. Stay tuned for more posts about us and things related. What we’ve launched so far is only the beginning!

Thede
thede@boxbe.com