Boxbe Blog

Once a month we get the Boxbe board of directors together to review our plans and progress (more on this later). This month, I happened to be in the office (I’m in Seattle most of the time and our office is in San Francisco). Being the aspiring photog, I took a few shots of the meeting in action.

(pictured: Esther Dyson)

Esther Dyson been a member of our board for some time, but this is the first time I’ve been down while she was in the office. It was great to finally meet her.

Esther has been a huge driver of a number of internet companies and technologies and has invested in a number of early internet startups including Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, Orbitz and of course, Boxbe. She wrote Release 1.0, an influential technology newsletter that has since been sold to O’Reilly.

Esther currently writes for the Huffington Post.

(pictured: Steve Jurvetson and Corbett Barr)

Steve Jurvetson is a member of our board and is a managing director of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson, a leading VC firm in the Valley. Steve’s previous investments have included Hotmail, Interwoven and Kana.

Corbett Barr is Boxbe’s co-founder and COO. You can find more about Corbett here.

(pictured: Thede Loder)

Thede Loder’s the boss, our venerable CEO and cofounder of the company. More about Thede here and here.

Ok, this one is completely for Thede, but if you’re interested in looking at finding spammers and other ne’er do wells using an economic angle. This a fascinating look into the minds of malware producers.

From the abstract:

“Computer security has recently imported a lot of ideas from economics, psychology and sociology, leading to fresh insights and new tools. I will describe one thread of research that draws together techniques from fields as diverse as signals intelligence and sociology to search for artificial communities. “

[via Akismet]

Here’s a little tidbit I discovered recently while using Apple’s Mail.app.

One of the pain points for me for using Boxbe is keeping my list of contacts up to date. As an Apple Mail user, there is an easy way to do this. After you update your contacts, you can easily export them to Boxbe.

“Previous Recipients”

While it’s not exactly in the most obvious place, select Window > Previous Recipients.

This is a list of all the people you have ever sent email to in Mail.app. Sort the far left column to get a list of all the people who are not already in your Address Book.

Select the people you would like to add to your Address Book and click “Add to Address Book.” That’s it.

To import these addresses into Boxbe, select all of your addresses and click File > Export vCard. Despite sounding like you’ll only be saving one vCard, this will export all the Address Book entries you’ve selected into one file. You can import this file into Boxbe on your Add Senders page.

I’ve always been a bit of an analytics nerd, but I have to admit, Xobni looks pretty cool. And if you use Outlook, this might be the answer to your prayers.

…It’s inbox, backwards

Launched at this week’s TC40 here in San Francisco and backed an old pal of mine at YCombinator, Xobni brings analytics and metadata to your Outlook inbox.

Ever wonder how many times someone has emailed you? How about finding that attachment or phone number that is buried somewhere? Outlook isn’t exactly helpful.

Xobni seems to be answer to every place that Outlook is lacking. Fast search, data extraction. threaded conversations and quick attachment recovery round out Xobni’s Outlook offering. Looks like a pretty cool plugin.

Xobni’s website

More coverage

Techcrunch
Dan Farber
VentureBeat

Ever wonder where spam, viruses and malware come from? Apparently, it comes from the mob.

Tony Soprano, spammer?

Auckland, New Zealand based computer security expert, Peter Gutmann has an informative presentation on the subject here. Malware, it seems, has become quite an industry and Gutmann posits that much of it is being ran by various mafias around the world.

Organized crime recruit so-called “script kiddies” that are writing malware and viruses for fun and pay them to turn their software into money making machines. Gutmann cites a number of internet business practices that have been employed by such as “Malware as a Service,” making it easier than ever to spam people.

A deal you can’t refuse

Gutman, the self proclaimed “professional paranoid,” goes into a high level of detail of exactly how people in the malware industry make money.

Here are a few examples:

• $1 per credit card numbers down to the verification number
• $40 credit card, with date of birth and social security number
• $1000 for 10,000 compromised computers.

Additionally, he takes a technical deep dive into how malware authors hide what they are doing.

If you are an aspiring spammer or virus maker, this is must read. For everyone else, read the end of the document about how to keep yourself safe.

Peter Gutmann
Economics of Malware pdf
[via Metafilter]

The Mozilla foundation has picked up development of Eudora and released a beta of their Thunderbird powered update to the venerable email client.

Brief History

If you’re an old time internet guy like myself, you might remember a little email application called Eudora. Eudora was one of the first email applications on a non-Unix system. Eudora started off as a free program, but eventually, became a for pay email client.

Around the turn of the century, Eudora kind of got lost in the world where email applications became free or were included with some more powerful package. In the Windows world, Eudora lost ground to “free” email apps. You had the choice of Microsoft Outlook, which you got “free” when you bought Microsoft Office, or Thunderbird, which you could download for free from Mozilla.

Eudora Reborn

Several months ago having effectively stopped developing Eudora all together, Qualcomm released the source code of Eudora for anyone who wanted to continue development. The Mozilla foundation took the Eudora interface and grafted it onto the Thunderbird mail client.

Eudora has had a storied history, but was one of the first and best email applications around. I’m glad Qualcomm made Eudora open source and Mozilla has picked up development efforts for the application. I haven’t looked at it in years, so maybe I’ll find something that I like.

Download the beta (via Ars Technica and Daring Fireball)

More discussion on Eudora at TechMeme

Here in the United States, we’re celebrating the fruits of our labor by taking a day off. Hope you are having a delightful day off work. We’re firing up the barbecue and kicking back on this warm Monday afternoon.

We’ve got a lot of exciting plans for the fall and we’re happy that you are here to join us.

Happy Labor Day from all of us here at Boxbe.

photo by Flickr user jeffereywithtwof’s