Boxbe Blog

Major Anti-Spam Lawsuit Filed in Virginia - Washington Post
“The company filed the suit on behalf of some 20,000 people who use its anti-spam tool. Web site owners use the project’s free software to generate pages that feature unique “spam trap” e-mail addresses each time those pages are visited. The software then records the Internet address of the visitor and the date and time of the visit. Because those addresses are never used to sign up for e-mail lists, the software can help investigators draw connections between harvesters and spammers if an address generated by a spam trap or “honey pot” later receives junk e-mail.” [via Ars Technica and Slashdot]

Before you declare email bankruptcy - Web Worker Daily
“Did you ever wish you could delete all your email without responding? Maybe you can. It’s called email bankruptcy. You realize you are never going to dig yourself out from under the pile of email in your inbox so you just declare that you won’t. You start afresh.”

Great tips on how to avoid an email overload calamity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve considered doing this.

Classic DM tactics are spam for filters - Direct Marketing News
“More and more well-intended e-mail is ending up in the junk box as companies and individuals tighten the screws on their anti-spam systems.”

Interesting article about the multitude of false positives that are generated by standard email spam filters.

Photo by Flickr member Rosa y Dani

So, we’ve talked about botnets in the recent post, but what exactly is a botnet?

From Wikipedia

While the term “botnet” can be used to refer to any group of bots, such as IRC bots, the word is generally used to refer to a collection of compromised, or Zombie computers running programs, usually referred to as worms, Trojan horses, or backdoors, under a common command and control infrastructure.

How widespread are these botnets? From a recent story from MSNBC, “Internet founding father Vint Cerf dramatically suggested that 150 million computers worldwide may have been hijacked by criminals.

Essentially, botnets are the root of all sorts of computer nastiness, but first and foremost, they seem to be the source of a very large portion of spam on the internet today.

To protect yourself (and others) from botnets, take a look at my post last week, 5 ways to protect your computer from botnets, spyware and other malware.

Here are some resources for learning more about botnets:

• Tracking Botnets
• Is the botnet battle already lost?
• Is your computer a criminal?

Photo from Wikipedia

Technorati tags: botnet, spam

Wow, that was fast.

I mentioned last week that Thunderbird 2.0 RC1 was released. Yesterday, the Mozilla foundation released Thunderbird 2.0.

From Wired.com:

Thunderbird 2.0 is a major leap forward for the Mozilla email client and boasts much improved performance as well as some great new features like support for message tagging, a customizable folder pane and one click integration with popular webmail services like GMail and .Mac.

Fire up your browser and go download it!

Release info [via Lifehacker]

So, besides using Boxbe to screen your email, here are the top five ways to protect your PC from botnets, spyware, and other malware.

1. Buy a Mac

Seriously. Last year, Symantec’s official blog caused waves by saying “Simply put, at the time of writing this article, there are no file-infecting viruses that can infect Mac OS X.”

This isn’t to say their couldn’t be malware for the Mac, it’s just that their isn’t any currently. Compared to the millions of viruses for Windows, that sounds pretty good to me. For many users this isn’t possible or desireable, so keep reading for things that you can do to secure your Windows installation.

2. Upgrade to Vista

One of the claimed benefits of upgrading to Windows Vista is increased security. Symantec has backed Microsoft up with a white paper [PDF] (and a site section) that has a detailed Vista security audit and their assessment that there have been no known Vista viruses to date.

3. Install security updates

One of the interesting things about bots, spyware and other software designed to exploit your computer, is that most people become infected after a fix has been released from Microsoft. Why? Well, let’s just say that creators of malware aren’t all super geniuses.

When an exploit is revealed, there is a gap in between when a fix is released and when users actually download and install the fix. That opening gives hackers an opportunity to create a program that exploits the very problem that was just patched.

Generally, I’d advise people to wait when it comes to installing recently updated software as sometimes the fix can be worse the original problem. However security updates should be installed right away.

4. Install and use anti-virus and anti-spyware applications

Most anti-virus and anti-spyware software can be scheduled to run at specific times of day. If you eat lunch at the same time every day, consider scheduling the software to run then. It could also serve as a helpful reminder to actually eat lunch.

And don’t forget to keep your virus and spyware definitions up to date. Having outdated definitions is kind of like not having protection at all.

5. Don’t open email attachments from untrusted senders

And frankly, sometimes even from trusted senders if they aren’t technically savvy. I can’t believe that this still needs to be mentioned but these attachments aren’t opening themselves.

Bonus: Turn off your PC at night

PCs these days have a number of power saving modes that make it acceptable to leave your computer on all the time. I had gotten in the habit of leaving my home computers on all the time to guarantee instant access whenever I needed them.

If your computer has been compromised by a spam bot, leaving your computer on 24/7 gives these bots more of an opportunity to send their illicit messages. While it won’t get rid of the spam bot, it certainly will cut back on the messages sent.

Finally

Short of turning off network connectivity to your PC, many security experts believe that malware is becoming more widespread and common, everyday computers have so much power that it is far more likely for a botnet to go undetected than ever before. The internet is still a wild wholly frontier, keep yourself safe out there.

photo from Flickr user brookenovak

Better Gmail Firefox plugin
Gina Trapani, blogger and Lifehacker supreme has a released a plugin for Gmail that pulls together several Greasemonkey scripts that improve Gmail’s overall usability.

Features include “adding saved searches, attachment icons, label colors, keyboard macros, a filter assistant and right-click conversation previews.”

Massive spam shot of ‘Storm Trojan’ reaches record proportions
According to a recent article in Computerworld, the Storm Trojan virus attack is sending 50 to 60 times the normal volume of spam. The trojan contains a rootkit to cloak itself and it adds the computer to it’s botnet army to perpetuate the trojan horse. Scary stuff. [via PC Doctor and Slashdot]

Gmail vs. Yahoo! Mail Prize Fight [video]
CNET decides which email service is better. We won’t disagree with the results.

I wanted to thank everyone who took the time last week for going over to the Valleywag “Hottest Company in Silicon Valley” poll. We had a great turn out with 92 votes, which would have put us at number 6 in between Zillow and Joost. Sadly, we were disqualified from the competition because we asked for help on the blog.

We did, however, get a special mention on their results post.

“By the way, a special prize to Tesla, Boxbe, Bebo and iStockphoto, the four companies which mobilized their employees or users to blitz the poll: we removed them from the final count, but they deserve credit for the enthusiasm of their campaigns. There is no appeal.”

It’s good to be loved.

Boxbe has been included in a poll on Valleywag today to select the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. We might be a little north, but we’d sure love your vote! We’re in with some pretty stiff competition from a lot bigger companies, so tell your friends, neighbors, coworkers, heck, anyone who will listen to go vote for us on Valleywag!

VOTE HERE

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Over the weekend, our friends over at Mozilla, shipped the release candidate (RC1) of the their Thunderbird 2.0 mail client..

Thunderbird’s update promises a slew of new features for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems designed around usability, better integration with online email applications and to “address information overload for users.”

New features include:

• Tagging
• Search as you type
• Gmail & .Mac integration
• Better filing tools
• Better support for extensions

If you love online email, why might you use Thunderbird instead?

Scott Gilbertson from Wired asked Scott MacGregor, Thunderbird’s lead engineer that very question today -

We believe the Thunderbird experience is better for moderate to heavy e-mail use. It’s much easier to process incoming mail — anyone who’s had to use web mail on vacation to deal with dozens of e-mails can testify to how tedious it can be.

Read more here.

Richard McManus, over at Read/Write Web has a fantastic overview as well.

Now, if they would just get Mac OS X Address Book integration, I’d be converted.

Download

Yesterday, I posted some male names that were still available from Boxbe, today, I’ll do the same for all the females in the audience.

I also mentioned yesterday that it really stinks getting an obscure email address. None of your friends can remember it easily. If you are meeting people for the first time, giving SusanB9875 doesn’t really stick in short term memory.

There is a counter view to all of this, however.

I worked at Yahoo! back in the 1990’s and I was fortunate (so I thought) to get randy@yahoo.com. Very memorable and (unfortunately) highly spammed. Sometimes bulk emailers resort to merely sending email to X @ Y.com, replacing X with every name in a dictionary. As you might imagine, I received a lot of unwanted email and sadly, I gave up the address due to that burden.

Having a good name at Boxbe, on the other hand, won’t fall victim to the same shenanigans. As I’ve mentioned before, you only receive email from people in your Boxbe address book, people who pass a test or pay a fee, so you’re only getting the email that you want.

Without further ado, here are some of the popular women’s names still available on Boxbe.

• Mary
• Patricia
• Linda
• Maria
• Susan
• Margaret
• Dorothy
• Betty
• Helen
• Sandra
• Donna
• Carol

More after the link

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I hate seeing this:

I’m a bit of an internet geek. I’ve been online for a long time as long time readers and old friends will know, and one of my pet peeves is being late to any hot new site.

I join (and have joined) a lot of web sites and getting “randy” or “randystewart” or even “rstewart” as a login on a site is always goal and it always bugs me whenever I can’t get one of those names. Getting Rstewar8945 is not my idea of a great login name or email address.

I’m telling you that to tell you this: While Boxbe has been adding members at a fair clip, we still have a number of great email addresses available.

If you are a Charles, Joseph or Thomas and are looking for that ultimate, easy to remember email address, today is your lucky day!

Here are some other male names that are still available:

• Donald
• Kenneth
• Edward
• Timothy
• Jose
• Walter
• Carl
• Roger
• Juan
• Jack
• Albert
• Gerald
• Samuel

Sign up for your great email address before its gone!

Tomorrow, we’ll be featuring all the women’s names that are still available.

More names after the link.

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You asked for it, we delivered it. This afternoon we pushed out a a plethora of often requested enhancements and fixes to your Boxbe Quarantine folder. These enhancements are designed to add functionality and make your quarantine folder easier to use. Below is a list of the upgrades we’ve released.

Sorting

Ooh, this is a biggie. Want to find all your blocked messages quickly? How about all messages from your Aunt Petunia’s new Gmail address?

Now you can sort messages based on Sender, Subject, Status and Date, and we’ve implemented it with healthy serving of AJAXy goodness so you don’t have to reload the page.

Quick Forward and Approve

We’re big fans of efficiency here at Boxbe so we take any opportunity to cut two steps down to one. If you just want to forward a message out of your quarantine, we’ve added a drop down to accomplish that and a few other time saving activities like approving the sender or their whole domain as well.

Bulk Forward and Approve

Coupled in nicely with our new sorting mechanism comes our bulk forward and approve tool. If you’ve found all of Aunt Petunia’s messages, you can now select them and forward them with the click of a button. Or if you want to delete all messages with the Subject “=?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCSkZFRD,” we’ve made it easy by placing these buttons at the top and bottom of your quarantine folder.

Multiple pages

Do you get a lot of mail in your quarantine like me? In any given week, I get over 300 messages in my quarantine. If I want to look at more than a week, that list can get really big.

Going forward, you can set the number of messages that appear on a single page to make looking at those long lists a little bit easier and a little bit faster. The quarantine will remember what you last set the number at so you won’t have to change it twice.

Feedback

We think these UI enhancements will improve your experience on Boxbe and will increase your efficiency when working in your quarantine.

If you have any questions about the changes or other feature requests, drop us a line at service@boxbe.com or to me at randy@boxbe.com.

I’ve been using Gmail a lot more lately testing our integration with Gmail and figuring out if I could live without Apple’s Mail.app. There are a number of good reasons for ditching a desktop application for Gmail - mobile email, one online location for all my email, and a great interface to name a few.

Some folks live and die by their inbox and not knowing if that ever important email from the boss or a new client is waiting for you is a deal killer for most web mail. Sure, hitting refresh is easy, but it’s not quite like using Outlook. For me, as handy as getting Gmail on my mobile would be in a pinch, ultimately, I’m reading and responding to email at my desk.

Enter Google Notifier

Google Notifier is an app that sits in your system tray in Windows or in the menu bar on a Mac that alerts you of new mail in your inbox, upcoming calendar events and even lets you add events quickly to your Google Calendar.

Google Notifier can change all “mailto:” links (links to email addresses) in web pages to use Gmail as its default email application and making it easier to use Gmail as your main email application day to day.

The latest version for Mac OS X, adds a contextual menu to add events for Google Calendar direct from any application and a method for setting Gmail to alert you only when certain messages arrive. Cool tool, indeed.

Google Notifier is still in beta (naturally), but like most of Google’s apps, this beta seems to be fairly rock solid.

Download Google Notifier