Boxbe Blog

McAfee released an interesting report this week about the mind games that spammers play on people and as eWeek called it, why we click on these emails.

From the “Say “No Thanks” to Unwanted Email” white paper from McAfee:

“Scam spam works best by providing recipients with a sense of familiarity and legitimacy, either by creating the illusion that the email is from a friend or colleague, or providing plausible warnings from a respected institution,” Dr. Blascovich noted. “Once the victim opens the email, criminals use two basic motivational processes, approach and avoidance, or a combination of the two, to persuade victims to click on dangerous links, provide personal information, or download risky files. By scamming $20 from just half of one percent of the U.S. population, cyber criminals can earn $15 million each day and nearly $5.5 billion in a year, a powerful attraction for skillful scam artists.”

For me, I like to keep spam out of my inbox altogether and thankfully that’s what Boxbe does.

The report goes on to talk about how most people are susceptible on some level to convincing spam and attacking base human emotion can fool almost all of us some of the time.

Personally, I’m still waiting on all the money to come in from Nigeria.

photo from Flickr user fabbio

If you need help with email etiquette, we don’t recommend using Stephen Colbert’s techniques. His guest in the clip below, Will Schwalbe, author of “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home,” on the other hand, could probably help you quite a bit.

Will Schwalbe has quite a bit more email etiquette advice on his blog, Think Before You Send including “Warming Cold Emails,” “Cautionary Tale About Threatening Emails” and his list of “Possibly Obnoxious Phrases.”

Ever thought about sending yourself a reminder, but you don’t really use Outlook or other calendaring systems?

Despite the fact that I use Apple’s built in iCal, often times I’ve thought that sending myself an email might be the best way to reach my future self (and yes, I could use iCal to do this, but what fun would that be?). Fortunately, an informative thread on Ask Metafilter has made several suggestions to email yourself in the future.

Emailing the Future

I Want Sandy
A clever service called I Want Sandy, from the lads that brought us Stikkit, is an entirely email based “secretarial service.” Part of that service sends email reminders for future events that you tell it to remember.

Like a real secretary (at least from what I’ve seen in the movies), cc’ing Sandy with “Sandy, remind me about my haircut appointment on July 6 1-2pm” will result in an email reminder around that time.

More from Sandy’s blog

Google Calendar
Like I Want Sandy, Google Calendar requires a login, but if you already have a Gmail account, you have easy, no sign-up access to Gcal.

Adding an event to the calendar, you have the option of when and how (popup, email or SMS) that message is (re)delivered to you.

Future Me

Future Me does one thing, it sends you a message in the future.

It’s not a reminder service, so you can’t send yourself a message any less than 90 days in the future. If you truly only want to send yourself a time capsule email, this is the service for you.

No login required here, but you do have to verify the email address that you plan to send the message to.

Dear Future Self, …

I’m thinking of using one of these services to remind me of bigger goals in life like wanting to exercise more or learning to kayak, rather than a standard reminder like “clean out your inbox.”

That’s one thing I don’t need a reminder of.

Yesterday, I mentioned we’ve revved our account home to make the site easier and more usable. I wanted to save one special feature to call out specifically today.

All Boxbe members now have the ability to send personalized invites to enable friends to use the service. We encourage your to tell your friends about the decrease in spam sent to your inbox, how your productivity has increased, and how your teeth are whiter (ok, maybe not the last one).

Currently, we’re limiting the number of invites to make sure our servers can handle the weight.

Inviting people to Boxbe equips your friends with the best spam protection available on the web and it enables us to attract advertisers to the service. Boxbe is powered by people and we’d love for your help in spreading the word.

Send Invites

We know that email can be a bit like a chore. You want to get in, get out and move on to something more fun like adding a new app to Facebook or enjoying another game of Desktop Tower Defense (not that we’ve ever seen either :-) ).

With that in mind, we’ve redesigned your account home from top to bottom to make using Boxbe a bit easier and whole lot faster to get what you need quickly.

Quarantine

We’ve floated all your messages that are least likely spam to a prominent top position so you can forward and add those contacts to your Mail Screening page.

Mail Screening Policy

We’ve renamed “Senders” to Mail Screening Policy to more accurately reflect what you are doing in those areas. This is where you tell us how much you want to charge unknown senders and adjust who can reach you and how.

Profile

Stats on your profile and quick access to make updates is next to the Mail Screening Policy section. We’ve added reminders of when your profile might be getting out of date or incomplete. Remember, your anonymized data is more valuable when it is more up to date.

Account Info

Last, we’ve moved your account info over the right and added the ability to add more email accounts to Boxbe for protection. Additionally, we’ve added a stats section to keep you up to date of how much spam we’ve shielded you from.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We hope you like the features we’ve added.

Infernal spam: Blocking e-mails constant struggle - Tulsa World

And apparently, incredibly expensive.

The tools may be effective, but for businesses like Bank of Oklahoma that run their own e-mail servers, they can be expensive. Brian Foster, senior vice president of information security at BOk, said a system to protect the company’s 3,000 to 6,000 unique addresses costs $30,000 to $50,000.

The article goes on to talk about the ever changing face of spam and the efforts at the Bank of Oklahoma to thwart it.

Why is Gmail still in beta
Good question, Esquire Magazine. We were wondering the same thing.

Gmail rolls out PowerPoint preview
Looks like Google might be getting closer to a full office suite. Yesterday, Google unveiled PowerPoint within Gmail. While you can’t create PowerPoint in Gmail, it sure seems like a good place to store them.

Oh, look you’re still getting plenty of spam
Techdirt has a sarcastic (and accurate) article about how putting one spammer in jail really just scratches the surface of the spam epidemic.

And speaking of jailed spammers -

Spam King denied bail
Our man in the can apparently will be staying there.

photo from Flickr user TheAlieness

From the “you win some, you lose some” department, Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that the “Appeals Court Says Feds Need Warrants to Search E-Mail.”

The Good

“A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.”

Which in and of itself is a good thing. In this day and age, email is such an important part of communication between people, having that communication protected like the telephone seems reasonable.

From the EFF:

“Email users clearly expect that their inboxes are private, but the government argues the Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect emails at all when they are stored with an ISP or a webmail provider like Hotmail or Gmail. EFF disagrees and argues that the Fourth Amendment applies online just as strongly as it does offline.”

The Bad

The bad news is that this new ruling is helping a known spammer, Steven Warshak, weasel his way out of a fraud conviction. Steven Warshak is known for launching Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, which sells Enzyte, a controversial “marital aid.”

Read
[via Slashdot.org]

More coverage of the story

EFF’s Case Briefing
Court to feds: Hands off ‘Smiling Bob’s’ e-mail - Network World
Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches - Privacy Digest
Regulating the Cloud: Warshak v. United States - University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog
Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says - Freedom to Tinker
Email Safe From Government Searches - WebProNews
Appeals court: Feds can’t secretly seize e-mail without a warrant - Ars Technica
The Privacy of Internet Email - Monsters and Critics
Volokh Conspiracy - lots of detail and backstory on the case.

photo from Flickr user heathermariecarr

Guy Kawasaki is my hero.

I’ve been a fan of Guy’s since he was an evangelist at Apple back in the good (and bad) old days.

He had my dream job - go out and tell everyone about products that change the world. Fortunately, I’ve been able to follow in Guy’s footsteps.

Evangelist, Entreprenuer, Author

Guy has had a amazing career. He created the field of corporate evangelism at Apple back in the 1980’s. He has started his own companies. Most recently, Guy Kawasaki spends his days as a venture capitalist, popular blogger and bestselling author.

Reading Guy’s books are like getting an MBA in product marketing (minus about $50k in tuition). From his marketing and strategy doctrine, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, to his manual on creating a startup company, The Art of the Start, to his new product and marketing creation manifesto, Rules for Revolutionaries, Guy is blessed with gift of being able to break through all the BS and boil down the essentials of what you need to do to make your product fly.

Needless to say, Guy Kawasaki’s books and blog postings are extremely helpful when starting a company or building a new product. Given all the help Guy has given us, we’d like to return the favor.

How Guy Kawasaki Could Use Boxbe

Man… so many uses of Boxbe for Guy, I don’t even know where to begin. I could give Guy some of the same advice I gave Lifehacker blogger, Gina Trapani for her blog, but perhaps a more novel approach would be to use Boxbe to filter pitches for his VC firm, Garage Technology Ventures.

Boxbe’s value proposition centers around the age old concept that time is money. Now, Guy Kawasaki is a busy man and it shouldn’t be free to waste his time with unwanted email and pitches for startup companies that are stupid. I bet a lot of these guys don’t even read his rules for pitching a VC.

5 Easy Steps

Guy - here’s what you can do to weed out the people who don’t follow your rules (or are otherwise irritating).

1. Sign up with Boxbe.
2. Set your access price to $99 (our current maximum).
3. Post your new email address on your blog.
4. Wait for pitches (this shouldn’t take long).
5. If the pitches waste your time, collect $99.

You could take one of your other, smarter investments to dinner with the money. Alternatively, you could give the money to charity - or keep it. You pick.

What about everybody else?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a VC or famous blogger to use Boxbe. Anyone who has a problem with spam or unwanted email can use Boxbe and just act like you are.

photo by Dave Sifry on Flickr

Ars Technica reported yesterday that a convicted “Spam King may rule prison cell for 11 years after Feds nail him.”

“(Adam) Vitale and codefendant Todd Moeller were arrested by the Secret Service in February 2006 after setting up a scheme to advertise a PC security application in exchange for 50 percent of the profits. Unfortunately for Vitale and Moeller, they were dealing with a government informant.”

Reuters added that “in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc.”

Yow… glad to see the CAN-SPAM Act is getting some of the big spammers here in the US.

Other reports on the story
All Things D
Download Squad
Deep Web

image by Flickr user r80o

Here’s an oft-requested little feature to make using Boxbe a little bit easier.

We’ve added an option to auto-approve senders who take a test to reach you. The idea is, once someone proves that they are not an automated sender, they will be able to reach you again.

While we’ve turned this feature on by default, you can easily turn it off by going to account preferences and deselecting the box.

We hope you like this new feature and if you have any difficulties, please let us know.

Tim Ferris over at the Huffington Post posted a video as well as some tips from Robert Scoble about how to deal with 10,000 or more messages a day. Man… now, there’s email overload.

Robert’s tips center around Microsoft Outlook which he has been using since 1990 and include

• Keeping all Outlook .PST files under 2GB in size to optimize speed and prevent crashes.
• Removing infrequently used .PST files.
• Renaming or appending frequently-used folders to appear at the top of the list.
• Responding to fewer e-mail is the holy grail.

We’d love to help you with your email overload problem, Robert. We’ll talk soon about some work we’re doing with Outlook.

It’s no secret that we love the Lifehacker blog (and lifehacking in general) here at Boxbe. We love all the efficiency it brings our lives and the general philosophy that things can always be better. Gmail tips, getting rid of junk snail mail, unix hacking, plugins to improve our experience on popular web sites, what’s not to love?

Who is Gina Trapani?

Well, the blog doesn’t just write and edit itself, folks. And we think that Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding Editor and efficiency wünderkind, is the bee’s knees. Being Editor of Lifehacker, one of the most popular blogs on the internet, Gina doesn’t just sit around waiting for her blogger minions to write up posts so she can nitpick vocabulary and spelling, Gina normally writes about 6 posts a day and two weekly features. Many of those posts are tips emailed in from readers.

Besides being a brave soul who actually has an email address on her personal blog, Lifehacker has a public email address on every single page to their tips hotline.

I can only imagine how much spam and unwanted email she must receive. Given all the help Gina has given us, we’d like the opportunity to return the favor.

How to use Boxbe

One way Gina could use Boxbe would be to make all of the people submitting their tips to Lifehacker prove that they are human with our simple captcha test. Better yet, to prevent marketers from over running her inbox with pitches, she could simply set her contact price to $.10. That way, she could quickly weed out everyone who wasn’t serious about getting her attention by collecting a dime from every submitter who was marketing to her. She’s not going to get rich off of this, but it does raise the bar to reach Gina.

Her posts show that Gina Trapani is a power user of Google’s Gmail. Arguably, she might know Gmail better than anyone. She’s even created a plugin to make it better. We’ve added our own improvements to Gmail by integrating Boxbe into the service. The process is free and easy and can dramatically improve the quality of email that you receive in Gmail.

Boxbe does this by reducing your inbox to only the email that you want to read and leaving the rest in our quarantine. In practice, we accomplish this by allowing emails from people who are pre-approved in your white list, that take a test to prove they are human or pay a fee.

But Gmail has a spam filter…

Despite Gmail’s wonderful spam filter, unwanted emails and spam do slip through. We’re firm believers that filter based solutions to stop spam simply won’t work in the long run. Ultimately, the war on spam is an arms race and the good guys are losing. Market based solutions like ours are really the only long term solution getting rid of unwanted email and spam.

While you might not be a famous blogger, I bet you do have a problem with spam. Just like Gina and the crew at Lifehacker, we’re here to help.

photo from Flickr user rcrowley