Boxbe Blog

This morning’s Seattle PI cover story reports that alleged spammer, Robert Soloway has been arrested under a provision of the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act.

AP Legal Affairs Writer, Gene Johnson reports that Robert Soloway is being held on “a 35-count indictment … charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.”

Soloway has previously lost two civil lawsuits resulting in fines of seven and ten million dollars, but this is his first criminal indictment.

“He’s one of the top 10 spammers in the world,” said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company’s Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. “He’s a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.”

Allegedly, Robert Soloway was using so-called “Zombie” computers (or botnets) to create his attacks. Federal agents have been quoted as saying that Soloway was responsible for billions of spam emails and that we should expect a drop in spam as a result of his arrest.

Spam Wars author, Danny Goodman disagrees:

I don’t care how big a spammer Soloway allegedly is; his contribution to the 63 billion spam messages per day (Ironport) can’t be so big that we’ll even notice the absence. Additionally, there is no way of knowing how much of his process is automated and already in the hopper waiting to spew. Also, he was taken into custody before 8:00am PDT yesterday. Spam volume here yesterday was (alas) quite normal.

We tend to agree with Danny as we’ve seen no marked decrease in quarantined messages, but nevertheless, it’s good to see such a notorious spammer brought to justice.

More discussion and commentary

Slashdot
CNET
Richi Jennings
Valleywag
John C. Dvorak
Tingog.com
Boing Boing
Download Squad
TechDirt

image by Flickr user r80o

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Contact us at careers@boxbe.com if you think you would be a good fit.

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As we head into the long weekend (in the US, anyway), here are some last email tips to ponder in traffic going to your favorite vacation spot. Summer is here and you need email efficiency more than ever.

Have a happy and safe Memorial Day from all of us here at Boxbe.

10 ways to get a grip on your e-mail - Fortune Magazine
Authors of the new book The Hamster Revolution: Stop Info-Glut and Reclaim Your Life!, offer up ways to get through email and change the way you look at time spent looking at email.

Is a one word “thanks” email unnecessary? - Lifehacker
Lifehacker readers debate the finer points of whether or not to send a one word email response “thanks” to people who you would thank face to face in real life. Email etiquette is ever changing amorphous beast. Personally, as a someone who works remotely, this is the only way I have to thank most people, so I’m all for it, your mileage may vary.

How to crank through your Gmail - Web Worker Daily
Leo Babauta over at Web Worker Daily gives us some hands on tips and tricks for getting through your email account Gmail-style. Keyboard shortcuts, filter suggestions and more await you on the other side of this link.

Finally, a follow up to a link we gave you last month.

E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’ - Washington Post
Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post reports on Fred Wilson’s email bankruptcy post last month. Fred gave his inbox the heave-ho by blogging an apology to all the unanswered emails in his inbox to start fresh. Memorial Day might just be the time to send out that email to start over with your email.

Iwo Jima image from Flickr user bootbearwdc

A few days ago, Domain Keys Identified Mail or DKIM, was approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). DKIM is one of the standards that we use at Boxbe to keep your email safe from phishing attacks and fake emails in general.

What is DKIM?

From Yahoo:

DKIM is an email authentication framework that addresses the widespread issue of email forgery, using cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. It allows email providers to validate an email’s originating domain, making use of blacklists and whitelists more effective. It also makes phishing attacks easier to detect by helping to identify abusive domains.

DKIM is good for the internet and will help detect forged email addresses. However, DKIM alone won’t stop spam originating from non-faked addresses nor will it stop other forms of unwanted email. Email expert Richi Jennings says “At best, they give a partial indication whether a message is spam or not, but their main use is to allow recipients to look up the reputation of the sending domain.”

The UK’s PC Advisor says “To make it work, DKIM now has to be adopted and incorporated by independent software vendors into their email applications and related infrastructures.”

That said, this is a step forward in stopping phishing schemes and other illegal activities that originate from non-authenticated senders and we are happy to see the DKIM standard approved and hopefully more widely adopted.

More about DKIM

DKIM Workgroup
DKIM FAQ
Yahoo! Anecdotal

More discussion of the standard approval

Promising antispam technique gets nod - CNET News
IETF backs new cryptographic scheme to battle the effects of spam - Ars Technica
Junked: Is this the end of spam and spoof email? - Silicon.com
Bye Bye Spam and Phishing with DKIM? - Slashdot.org
New Spec Could Cut Phishing, Spam - Dark Reading
IETF approves DKIM to fight spam and phishing - A Canadian Geek
Why DKIM will fail - Spin on Cue
Promising new anti-spam techique gains key approval - Geeks Are Sexy

photo from Flickr user lordcuauhtli

Eric Rice and Robert Scoble, a couple of bloggers who would benefit from using Boxbe.

I’ve been blogging for almost two years now and I love to hear from readers. Comments are a great place for people to continue the conversation, but often I’d like to take some conversations offline.

Most people don’t want to post their email address on their blog for fear of spam. If you do post your email address on your blog, that fear is realized.

I’ve seen lots of ways people get around not posting their actual email address like typing out “randy at boxbe dot com” or “randy at the URL you see above.” Worse, you might have a form that people can fill out to reach you, which doesn’t really make readers feel all warm and fuzzy when they want to reach you.

If you want to reach me, here’s a good old fashioned “mailto:” link - randy@boxbe.com.

I can post this email address anywhere I’d like:

• blogs,
• forums,
• comments,
• Twitter,
• or anywhere I’d want someone to be able to reach me later.

Here’s how it works

When people I haven’t pre-approved email me for the first time, they have to prove they are not an automated sender. I don’t think that is too much to ask. If they are a real person, I approve them to send me more emails by clicking “Approve” right in the message. I’m pretty friendly like that.

Use Gmail?

If you use Gmail, we’ve got you covered. With our Gmail integration, we’ve made it even easier to get a clean email inbox. Go here, plug in your Gmail address, click the button and you’re done.

Why use Boxbe?

Bloggers need to talk to their adoring fans and blogging isn’t a one way street. Blogging is about conversation. Many of those conversations can occur within or amongst blogs, but not everyone wants their opinion, question, or letters of love and devotion to be part of the public domain.

You want to put your email in a public place but you don’t want to be buried in spam. Boxbe can help you do that.

Over the past few months, I’ve talked in the blog about Boxbe’s mission, new features, your attention and about the world of email in general. I haven’t talked about who should use Boxbe and why.

What is Boxbe?

To review what we’re all about, Boxbe is a platform to help you regain control of your attention and the center of most people’s attention is their email inbox. From Thede’s opening post describing Boxbe:

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.

While I receive somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 emails a day (not including spam), I know many other people whose daily email volume reaches into the multiple of hundreds. Of course, not every email needs to be responded to, but most emails need to be read.

If you receive a lot of email, I bet you also receive a lot of unwanted email. Some might call that unwanted email spam. Others might not call it anything all as it is adrift in the barren wasteland that is their unopened, unattended to email inbox.

Boxbe - Who is it good for?

The obvious answer to me is everyone. I haven’t met anyone who says, “You know, I just don’t receive enough email.” But, there are some specific people and groups of people who might benefit more by using Boxbe.

From time to time, I’ll be talking about groups of people or specific individuals that we think would benefit from using Boxbe. Some of those specific groups of people will include bloggers, podcasters, politicians, small business owners, and anyone whose livelihood is utterly dependent on getting important email.

Yahoo Mail unlimited rolling out
As mentioned back in March, Yahoo! Mail has started rolling out its unlimited storage this week. Our friends at Mashable are encouraging us to test what “unlimited” means.

Google Gmail: Hot, hip or 3rd place?
Donna Bogatin over at ZDNet talks about Gmail and it’s users. Recent studies have shown Gmail to be the third most popular email service, but it is used by the young and wealthy.

Pros and cons of web-based mail
J D Biersdorfer of the New York Times debates the finer points of using email on the web versus a desktop client. We love email of all kinds here at Boxbe.

Image spam by the numbers
Informative article (although formatted in a bewildering way) about the methods used by image spammers. [via Slashdot]

Completely unrelated image by Flickr user eva101.

Shortcuts for Special Gmail Labels
Over at the Google Operating System blog, Ionut Alex Chitu details how to use Gmail’s labeling system’s undocumented shortcuts. “In Gmail every built-in view (e.g.: inbox, trash, read mail) is actually a label. So if you want to view all the unread messages from the inbox, you could search for: label:inbox label:unread.” [via Lifehacker]

Rich HTML email signatures straight from Gmail
Derek Punsalan shows how to get rich text into Gmail signatures. While it does require Firefox and the Better Gmail extension, we know you’re already using those anyway.

Add Outlook to your Google homepage
Our friends at Lifehacker show off how to get your Outlook mail to show up on your iGoogle personalized home page. This gadget does require you to use Windows XP and IE (or a slightly hacked version of Firefox). Very cool indeed.

NOTE:Boxbe is discontinuing support for adding a Gmail account in this way.

Edited February 4, 2008

We’ve just made integrating Boxbe with Gmail a heck of a lot simpler. I had planned to put a screen shot here, but it’s so easy, it seemed like a waste of bandwidth :-).

Starting today, we’ve enabled single click Gmail installation from your account home page. We’ve taken all the steps involved and reduced them to them to a few fields and a button.

Gmail integration is accessible directly here and is permanently accessible from your account home page.

What this does

We posted back in March about a method to set up Gmail to redirect email into Boxbe’s filter as well as setting up a signature to ensure redelivery of messages. The only thing we’ve changed is that we have automated the process for you.

Existing Members

If you are an existing member and you already use Gmail forwarding, you do not need to make any changes. We have automated the work you’ve already done.

If you were eager to see the changes we’ve made and already clicked the button, no worries. You will merely overwrite the changes you made previously, but the filter should still work.

Use Boxbe with Gmail

If you haven’t integrated Boxbe filtering for your Gmail account yet, we hope this makes it much easier.

Note to Gtalk users:
We’ve discovered a bug where Gtalk chats are not logged in your communications history. Existing conversations will not be affected. We hope to have this remedied soon.
[edited: Friday, May 11, 2007]

We have fixed the issue and we will push a fix out as soon as possible.
Monday, May 14, 2007

The issue has been resolved
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Congrats to the Hotmail team at Microsoft for deploying the new version of the Hotmail service to users and removing that beta tag. Following are links to the details of the launch.

Windows Live Hotmail launches
After a year long beta, Windows Live Hotmail launched yesterday with a whole bunch of new features including 2 gigabytes of storage, Outlook-like design, auto-completion and more.

Rebuilding Hotmail from scratch
A fascinating look at the rebuilding of the Hotmail service.

Windows Live Hotmail vs Gmail
Pete Cashmore over at Mashable compares the new Windows Live Hotmail to Gmail. Is it time to switch? I won’t ruin it for you as we are platform agnostic here at Boxbe.

Other links: Webware, Techcrunch, eWeek.

Undelivered e-mail an offshoot of spam-prevention
John Agsalud of the Honolulu Star Bulletin reports on the increase in false positives in spam filtering systems (FYI, a false positive is a message incorrectly identified as spam).

This battle of good versus evil has been going on for years. Unfortunately, the bad guys have improved their stock so much that the good guys are starting to have a difficult time fighting back. The end result? The good guys’ software is becoming more error-prone and mis-identifying messages as spam when they really are not.

We launched two enhancements yesterday afternoon to the Boxbe Quarantine: Junk Ratings and Message Search. Both features are designed to help you get through your quarantine folder more quickly and easily.

Junk Ratings

Our new junk rating is a way to make sifting through your quarantine easier. We’ve rated messages on a scale of one through ten based on what we think is more or less likely to be email that you would want.

Messages are also color coded like a stop light for quick scanning.

Green = least likely to be junk mail.
Yellow = somewhat likely to be junk mail.
Red = most likely junk mail.

As no spam filter is perfect, the junk rating numbers are meant as a guide to help you get through your quarantine more quickly. However, like any guide, use your own judgment when managing your quarantine.

Message Search

We’ve added the ability to search senders and subjects to find messages, senders or domains that you might want to approve. This search does not include the contents of the messages, rather just senders and subjects.

Message search works with the other filters on top of your quarantine, so you can specify dates and status as part of your search.

We hope you like our new enhancements.

Wired News reports today on the 29th anniversary of the “first piece of unsolicited bulk e-mail” sent out over the internet. Sent from DEC employee, Gary Thuerk to 400 people on Arpanet (the precursor network to the internet), this email started the menace that we all deal with today.

Apparently, Mr. Thuerk “thought Arpanet users would find it cool that DEC had integrated Arpanet protocol support directly into the new DEC-20 and TOPS-20 OS,” according to EFF Chairman Brad Templeton, who has an archive of the entire message.

The content of that message starts:

“DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.”

Looks like spam was hard to read from the beginning.

As you can imagine, people weren’t too happy to have their inbox invaded by unwanted and unrequested email. Brad Templeton’s page has the full message as well as reactions to that initial spam.

Read [via Wired News]

photo from Flickr member brunkfordbraun