Boxbe Blog

After a year in beta, Yahoo! Mail has been “officially” released. Congratulations to our friends down in Sunnyvale on this momentus release. Naturally, leaving beta means adding even more features.

Here’s the skinny:

Search Improvements

Being able to refine my searches within email is something I miss when using web based email over Outlook or Apple’s Mail program. Yahoo! has answered this with a series of great refinement options.

Currently, you can refine searches by (pictured):

• Sender
• Folder
• Date
• Attachment Type
• Message Status

Yahoo! Messenger

Following Gmail’s lead, Yahoo! has incorporated Yahoo! Messenger into the Yahoo! Mail interface. AIMing to be your communications dashboard, moving IM into Yahoo! Mail is a great help for people like me who communicate via IM all day.

For an added dose of interoperability, if you have friends that use MSN Messenger, you can add them to friends list in Yahoo! Messenger as well. (I’m now just one step closer to not using Adium and Trillian).

Text Messaging

Finally, for you crazy kids out there with your texting and your LOL ZOMG, Yahoo! is helping you keep track of your posse via SMS.

You can now send and receive txt messages directly from the Yahoo! Mail interface and view the conversations inline

Now, I know there are other places you can send SMS on the web for free, but as part of my centralized communications arsenal that is Yahoo! Mail, I don’t have to go looking very far.

No word on whether Yahoo! is paying my texting bill :-)

More on Yahoo!’s Blog

Andrea Coombs at the Wall Street Journal tells us that we need to take control of our email and quotes some of our favorite people

Merlin Mann (43 Folders), David Allen (author of “Getting Things Done“) and Julie Morgenstern (author of numerous productivity books), all take potshots at our favorite medium, email.

Here are some highlights:

Read

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m spending a lot of quality time working in Yahoo! Mail these days. While I’ve always used Yahoo! Mail as a primary account, I’ve generally used POP to retrieve email via OS X’s Mail application.

Much like Gmail, almost every command in Yahoo! Mail is accessible via keyboard shortcut. While these commands are readily available on Yahoo! Mail’s help site, I’ve created a one page printable version for your desktop convenience.

Print it

I’ve embedded a printable document with Scrib’d document embed application. You can view and print the document just by clicking below.

Here’s a video from the guys that coined the term.

Boxbe does a great job of getting rid of spam, but what about bacn (pronounced bacon)?

This is a bit of a tougher problem. As I’ve been testing Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail, I’ve realized that I get a lot of bacn and adding those senders to my list of approved emailers isn’t fun.

What is bacn?

If you’re like me ten minutes ago, you might be scratching your head. bacn, according to this video from Podcamp Pittsburgh last weekend, is the email that you want to receive, but it’s not immediately valuable. There has been a lot of discussion on the web of this “middle class” of email in the last few days.

People who add you as a friend on Facebook, shipping notices from Amazon, or bill pay notices from Wells Fargo could all be classified as bacn.

A few people in the blogosphere have protested the term, but as good as the real bacon might taste, it sure is something you shouldn’t eat all the time.

What to do with bacn?

What do you consider bacn? Better yet, what do you do with bacn?

Do you set up filters in your email? Do you just let it sit in your inbox? Personally, I use Apple Mail and have a number of filters set up to take these messages out of my inbox and into their own special little place.

Update: there is a great bacn discussion over at Lifehacker.

photo from Flickr user bahkubean

Ok, enough with the teasing, on with the announcing…

We’re pleased to announce a (limited) beta of our newest product which will integrate Boxbe’s service into Yahoo! Mail.

Our Yahoo! Mail integration will work similarly to our Gmail in that all of your email will still come to your Yahoo! Mail account.

Additionally, we will be offering access to your quarantined messages from within Yahoo! Mail and we’ll scan the list of people that you regularly email to ensure that their emails continue to come through to your inbox.

The beta will work with both the new beta Yahoo! Mail as well as the older interface.

Limited beta

While we are very excited about this new integration, we haven’t released this full-fledged product yet. We are offering a limited beta to those interested in helping us test the product. We’ll be rolling it out slowly, so don’t get discouraged if you’re not first on the list.

Email us to be selected for the beta.

Sorry to keep you waiting, but it’s getting late and frankly, I’d rather give it the weekend before we announce anything. I’ll be headed to BarCampBlock tomorrow so if you’re interested, ping me there.

If you really want to know more, check out my Flickr or Twitter streams this weekend.

Have a good weekend and we’ll see you on Monday.

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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.

Java Web Developer

You will be responsible for building cutting-edge web-based Java applications. We need someone with a top-to-bottom understanding of both the Web and Java. Your responsibility will be to design and develop software as well as to architect a robust and scalable platform.

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Like being too rich or too thin, in the world of email, you can never have “enough” storage. Or so our pals at Google and Hotmail are telling us.

Coming on the heels of Yahoo’s unlimited storage announcement, these announcements seem sort of silly. However, no one really seems to know what “unlimited” really means. I’m sure that users of Hotmail and Gmail will be happy with these upgrades.

Google Storage

Google is now offering paid upgrades for both Gmail and Picasa.

• 6 GB for $20 a year
• 25 GB for $75.00 a year
• 100 GB for $250 a year
• 250 GB for $500 a year

While on the pricey side, if you are a user of these services (especially Picasa) having storage like this is certainly worthwhile.

While I’m an avid Flickr user, having a backed up version of my photos online is invaluable.

Read

Hotmail Upgrades

Hotmail has joined the free upgrade party by offering 5 GB of storage for free on their service, bringing them into the number two spot for overall free storage space.

Hotmail has been evolving as it is rolled into the Microsoft’s Windows Live initiative. With lots of new features (which we’ve talked about in the past) and new storage capacity, Hotmail is looking better and better.

Read

Sorry to be so cryptic, but I wanted to leave a place holder for an announcements we have coming very soon.

We wanted to have them in time for Gnomedex, but alas, the stars didn’t quite align.

There are a couple of things that need to happen first and I will post here as soon as I can.

It’s big.

Stay tuned.

I travel to a lot of conferences throughout the year, but Gnomedex is held in my backyard here in Seattle. Gnomedex is the self proclaimed “conference of the blogosphere.” While a little geeky, generally the signal to noise ratio is high on the signal side.

If you are at the conference stop by and say hi. Here’s a picture of me and you can follow my comments about the conference on Twitter and pictures on Flickr.

If you want to regain control of your email inbox, we’d love to help you and I can tell you more about our service.

“Stopping spam [using Bayesian filtering] is a bit like trying to stop the rain by catching every drop before it hits the ground.”

You had me at hello, Michael Specter.

If you want a well written, literary non-fiction description of the worldwide spam problem, Michael Specter at the New Yorker serves one up this week.

Productivity

Specter takes the productivity angle with when looking at spam:

If a billion spam messages elude detection every day—which means that ninety-nine per cent do not—that adds up to a hundred and fifty-nine years of collective time lost hitting the delete button every day.

Not to mention sore fingers….

Legislation

Additionally, Specter shows how little legislation has helped us dig out of our collective spam problem.

In the year after the law was enacted (2003), less than seven per cent of spam complied with the requirements of the legislation, according to MX Logic, an Internet-security firm. Last year, compliance with the law never even reached one per cent.

Finally

A great summary of where we are and where we’ve been, but Brad Taylor, spam czar of Google sums most anti-spam software up best:

“But I wanted to fix the problem and return to the bliss that existed before spam,’’ he said. “Often the fight is fun, like a game. But last year there were some low points. We started getting these image spams, and the spammer would adapt to anything we did. He would write software that cut the image into little pieces that reassembled by the time you opened your mail. When we figured out how to deal with that, he started making text that waved around and curved in odd ways. So we figured that out. Then he started with random images.’’ Taylor laughed. “This went on for a while. But, finally, he just gave up. And that’s our hope. It’s kind of like war. One side eventually gets tired. And we just can’t let it be us.”

To you and me, that sounds a heck of lot like an arms race. I’m glad we’re aiming a little higher than tit for tat in the war on spam.

Read

[via Slashdot]

Friend of emailers everywhere, Merlin Mann has been an organizational hero of mine. Inbox Zero” is a concept Merlin pioneered (with a little help from GTD) and it is “an action based” strategy keeps your inbox free of all emails and creates a methodology for keeping your email centric life sane.

Sound good? Maybe a little scary? You can read more about Merlin’s system over on his blog, 43 Folders.

Embedded below is a talk Merlin did recently at Google talking about Inbox Zero. The video is about an hour, but is chock full of great advice. And, the title of this post will become more clear when you watch the video.