We hope you are having a relaxing holiday this year knowing that your email is protected by Boxbe.
We’re off for a few days, but don’t worry, we’ve got elves watching all of your email :-).
Wishing you the best this holiday season.
We’ll see you in 2008.
Two terms we spent a little time talking about this year made the New York Times 2007 Buzzword List. The Times takes the last Sunday of every year to review the year. Now, there are a lot of end of the year lists, but the Buzzword list is unique, fun and informative.
Bacn, as you recall, is “Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.”
Congrats to the Podcamp Pittsburgh folks for making “Bacn” one of 2007’s top buzzwords.
Email Bankruptcy is something most Boxbe users won’t ever have to declare, but we can’t guard against friends, family and colleagues expecting a response to every message they send you.
What you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response.
Lawrence Lessig and Fred Wilson both famously declared email bankruptcy in the last couple of years. We wish them a better, more productive email life in 2008.
Other tech related terms from this year - crowdsourcing, life streaming, tumblelog, lolcat and one for Mark (our VP of Corp Dev and former CNN producer), I-reporter.
Feature: Getting Things Done with labels and filters in Gmail 2.0 - Geek.com
Joel Evans over at Geek.com details how to use the new features of Gmail to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) system with Gmail.
New URL features can make your e-mail productive again - Ars Technica
New linking feature in Mac OS X Mail and in Gmail documented by Ars Technica and John Gruber.
Easily Transfer Emails from Hotmail to Gmail Via Outlook Connector - Digital Inspiration Technology Guide
How to move your Hotmail email to Gmail via Outlook.
Gmail Tip: Import Messages into Gmail via IMAP - Dracoware
"Here’s a quick overview of how to get all of your old emails into Gmail as painlessly as possible (and one way that preserves dates!)."
NOTE: Boxbe is discontinuing support for removing Boxbe for Gmail in this way. Please follow the directions at the bottom of this post to remove Boxbe for Gmail.
Edited February 4, 2008
Recently, we’ve had a little bug that made it difficult to remove Boxbe protection from Gmail accounts. The bug has been fixed, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell everyone how to disable Boxbe for your email account (particularly Gmail). We know some people may want to discontinue service after trying it and we’ve made it easy to enable and disable accounts.
We’ve added a filter to Gmail to selectively forward email to Boxbe and send email from senders on your Guest List back to Gmail. You can turn this on and off on the site by going to the Boxbe Dashboard and click “Disable” next to the email address you want to disable (this works with the other addresses, too).
Next, you’ll be taken to a screen that you’ll have to enter in your Gmail password.
If for some reason, that doesn’t work, click through to the next page to get the details on how to turn Boxbe for Gmail off in Gmail.
To turn off Boxbe for Gmail manually, follow these steps.
First, go to your settings from within Gmail.
Second, once inside your Gmail Settings, click “Filters.”
Finally, find the Boxbe filter (this will be the one that says “Do this: Forward to username@boxbe.com, Skip Inbox, Delete it”
Once you’ve removed the filter, Boxbe won’t be protecting your Gmail account anymore.
You can always re-enable the account on your Boxbe Dashboard.
With the recent relaunch of our site, I thought this might be an opportune moment to better explain what Boxbe is and how we can help you.
Email is an essential tool that we use in all areas of our lives, personal and professional. Yet it has not kept pace with the way people communicate.
Email as we know it is broken. It hasn’t changed with the times and many people claim to be abandoning email and young people aren’t adopting it.
Boxbe is a service that lets you easily create an email guest list so that you can make sure you receive email messages from people who matter to you.
A Boxbe Guest List works like lists on popular social networking sites - it protects and guarantees the delivery of email from friends, family, co-workers or even entire domains.
When you first sign up, Boxbe scans your existing email folders and address book to create a Guest List that includes all the people you’ve recently and frequently emailed. The Guest List is live and dynamic and automatically includes new people you want to receive email from, so your friends are already included
When you receive an email from someone you have not already pre-approved, you can opt to approve the sender. She will then be added to your Boxbe Guest List. We are adapting email for the social networking generation.
Inboxes are filled with unwanted messages, making it hard to find the things you do want. Or sometimes important messages are marked as junk by an over zealous spam filter.
Boxbe cleans up your inbox and guarantees emails from people who matter, and stops those that are unwanted.
Boxbe is designed for the millions of email users who want better control of their email. Boxbe works with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Outlook.
Boxbe for Your Domain is in beta testing – it and more services will be rolled out in 2008!
Ever miss an important email because it got marked as spam?
Boxbe ranks incoming messages from 1-10, and color codes them. The lower the number, the better the message.
Green messages mean likely good, yellow means caution and red means bad. If your Aunt Hilda just changed her email address, she will likely get a low score marked green. However, a sender that isn’t who they claim to be will get a high score marked red.
Boxbe empowers you to choose which people or businesses can reach you. Anyone who isn’t on your Guest List will receive a request to verify their message before it is delivered to your inbox. Legitimate marketers who want to reach you have the option of paying a small fee that you set so that they can get their message through to you.
Unverified messages are held in your Waiting List for you to review, and approve or decline at anytime.
Boxbe helps you sift through the barrage of email you receive on a daily basis. We’re here to uncomplicate your inbox and help you get to the messages you want to receive.
We’ve gotten a few questions about adding domains to your Guest List and thought having a how to blog post might answer other questions folks may have.
A domain name is the bit after the “@” in your email address. For example, in the email address, randy@boxbe.com, boxbe.com is the domain name.
Adding a domain name can make it easy for groups of people (like co-workers) to email you without getting an email invitation back.
Other examples might include emails you get from a company who’s emails you might always want to receive. I buy a lot of goods from Amazon.com and also have an affiliate account, so I have the Amazon.com domain approved.
It’s easy to add a domain name to your Guest List. Adding a domain name is just like adding a regular email address. From your Approved Guest List, just type in a the domain name you would like to approve and click “Add.”
Alternatively, you can list domains when you import a larger list of contacts on the import contacts page.
The Associated Press is warning email users yesterday to be wary of coupons that they have received via email.
Instead of money saving deals, e-mailed coupons could lead recipients into “phishing” schemes where the consumer is redirected to a copycat site, whose real purpose is to siphon the user’s credit card information, passwords and other financial data, IBM Corp. security executive Christopher Rouland warned.
If you are a Boxbe member and have approved email from say Amazon.com, messages from a an address that claims to be from Amazon, but really aren’t, won’t make it through to your inbox.
Boxbe uses two email authentication methods (DKIM and SPF) to verify that the emailer is who they claim to be. DKIM and SPF are two email authentication standards backed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL. Boxbe blocks messages that come from senders who claim to be someone that they are not
Be safe out there this holiday season and let us worry about your email.
Read
Wanted to thank Scott Gilbertson over at Wired for a thorough overview of Boxbe’s service and how to get it set up. Scott interviewed Boxbe CEO Thede Loder last week and I helped give him a demo of the service.
Here’s a quote from the story:
Borrowing some ideas from IM and social networking, Boxbe adds a privilege system to your inbox which allows you to create an e-mail “friends list,” much like those on social sites. It’s designed to help narrow down your e-mail workflow so you can focus more closely on the people who matter to you.
While Scott gives the most thorough overview of any media outlet to date, we’ll preview more of the site later this week.