Boxbe Blog

To our valued Boxbe for Gmail members,

As proponents of good online security practices, Boxbe is happy to announce basic support of Google’s Advanced Sign-In (click here for Google’s announcement).   If you are not familiar with Google’s multi-factor (2-step) authentication and support for per-application passwords, you can read more about it here.

Or watch the video below.

Using Advanced Sign-in with Boxbe

Essentially, when you enable 2-step verification for your Google account, Google effectively disables (blocks) all third-party apps including those that use IMAP (Boxbe uses IMAP).  To re-enable access for a third-party application such as Boxbe, you must explicitly generate a password using Google’s own special password generator and then provide that password to the application (to Boxbe).

You may wish to view the video referenced above (and here again) for additional explanation.

Step by Step Instructions  

If you have enrolled in 2-step verification, you should:

1)   Go to Google’s setup 2-step verification page (opens in new window).  Once setup for 2-step verification, you will need to generate a password.

2)   You should then be taken to Google’s authorizing applications & sites page to generate a password for use with Boxbe.  Save this password.

3)   Navigate to the Boxbe Email Enrollment Status Page and log in (opens in new window).

4)   For your Gmail account to be reset in Boxbe you will need to re-establish the link by clicking on “disable” first (next to the email you are enrolling in 2-step verification).  Once the email is visible in the Other Addresses section, click on “enable”…  You will be prompted to enter your password.

5)   Enter the newly generated Google password into the password field (please note that this is not the field to your Boxbe account).

6)   When this is complete, you will no longer need to enter the generated password, as it is a one-time process.

And congratulations: You’re Done!

Note: To turn off 2-step verification, instructions by Google are provided here.

Please write to support@boxbe.com if you require any assistance for any Boxbe service issues.

Some of you may have noticed that the relevance ranking which Boxbe assigns to messages from unapproved senders (sometimes called a “spam score”, or the 1-10 ranking) is not as accurate or consistent as before.  This is because this feature is now partially disabled.

Within the next month or so Boxbe will remove this feature completely. The reason we are removing message rankings is that the mainstream ISPs (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo!) have become much better at correctly placing email in the Inbox or the Spam folder.  In addition, computing the relevance score is an expensive operation for Boxbe to perform, so it makes sense to rely upon the ISPs good work.

Not to worry, we will still be analyzing each of your messages and considering your preference settings when deciding what to do with them.

* FYI we’re excited! – In future months, we’ll be focusing our development efforts in some new areas and we look forward to sharing them with you as they happen!

Have Questions?  Check this out…

Boxbe provides a great deal of user help and support.  From our FAQ list and How It Works page, to our user-control panels and our Blog you are currently reading!

We also provide a technical support email for any personal issues, comments or suggestions that might arise: support@boxbe.com.

Some Boxbe insight can also be found in following video:

Our Friends of Friends/Contacts of Friends feature has been disabled for the time being.  Boxbe has been named a defendant in a patent suit, and while we do not believe the patent to be valid or that Boxbe’s service infringes, we have in good faith disabled this feature.  Sometimes great ideas are taken, to be protected under law, keeping those others who think of them from being able to use them.

We understand this may be a little unsettling to those of you who found the feature to be particularly useful, but “grieve not you; you who are welcome notwithstanding”; Boxbe’s superb system is still robustly distinctive!  And our user community continues to grow vigorously.

Shakespeare, William.  The Merchant of Venice.  V. I. 216-262.

Boxbe will experience a bit of downtime tomorrow, September 30, 2009, as we need to upgrade our servers to increase capacity.

We’ve experienced unprecedented growth over the last six months as more people have joined Boxbe than ever before. Additionally, we’ve noted an increase in unwanted email and spam, which we diligently remove from your inbox. We’ll be better able to handle all of our new users and email volume after our upgrades.

We anticipate that this downtime will take most of the day, starting at around 10am PDT. You do not need to do anything. Our service will resume as soon as our servers are back online. Additionally, when Boxbe comes back up, we will process the mail that we missed while we were down.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for using Boxbe.

Here’s a little video we did to better describe how Boxbe can help you say goodbye to email overload. Please share it with your friends!

This video can also be seen on our How It Works page.

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to everyone who has been using Boxbe over the last year. The blog has been quiet for a while, but I wanted to let you know we’ve got some exciting announcements coming soon.

Also, we periodically update our Twitter feed with answers to questions that folks might have and letting people know about issues that crop up from time to time.

Follow Boxbe on Twitter

Hope you had a great holiday and we’re looking forward to a helping you tame your inbox mess in 2009!

[photo by jurvetson]

Thede, Thomas and I are heading to down to Sunnyvale tomorrow for Yahoo! Hack Day. Hopefully, we’ll be hacking together the future of Boxbe while we are there.

We use the Yahoo! Mail API to make Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail work and we’ll be adding their Address Book API very soon so that we’re not using that not-so-nice anti-pattern we keep hearing about. We’re hoping to learn more about it and other APIs that Yahoo! is opening up.

Say Hi

If you are going to Hack Day and want to meet up, send me a note at randy@boxbe.com. Hope to see you there.

You can see the video that Yahoo! put together for their Hack Day. (more…)

photo from Flickr user, kjunstorm

I go to a few tech conferences every year, but in general, my favorite one is Gnomedex. It’s a great group of people and always an interesting set of speakers.

This year was especially nice as randomly, a woman walked up to me and says, “I love you guys.” I was a little startled at first, but then I realized she was one of the folks that follows Boxbe’s Twitter feed, An Bui. It seems we’d made her pretty happy with our Outlook plugin and how it killed spam from her inbox.

I was pretty stoked to get a little adulation for our service and remembered that after a recent survey we had received lots of great feedback about how we’d helped other people tame their inboxes, too.

Here are some quotes from the survey (which happened before we released Outlook). Thanks everyone for your kind words.

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail

“My ~10 year old Yahoo account is manageable once again.” – George B.

“I like that it gives me a chance to stop accepting emails from companies I don’t use any longer.”- Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I like this service because it is different from anything else I have experienced. I want others to have the same opportunity.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I was about to abandon my yahoo account. now i don’t have to. thanks!” – Sharon S.

“I think Boxbe is awesome!” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“Can’t get any easier to use.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“Thanks for fixing my Yahoo! I’d given up on using it about a year ago, and set it to vacation response. Now all those business cards are usable again. ;)” – Joseph K.

“You’ve got a big fan, and one who will share the information with friends soon.”- Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I am a supporter, and I think your stuff generally works.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“It catches the rest of the stuff Yahoo spam doesn’t so that my Inbox is spam-free.” – Tabatha L.

Public Email Address

“This is the most important email advance since Gmail in my book. It’s an entirely disruptive technology that serves as an electronic gatekeeper. [yes, you may use that as a quote]” – Boxbe for Yahoo! and Boxbe Public Email user

“There’s no more worry about attaching an email somewhere and having it harvested. That’s awesome.” – Boxbe for Yahoo! and Boxbe Public Email user

“It is a great email service to use as a public address.” – Boxbe Public Email user

General

“It does a great job of filtering my mail.” – Anna R.

“I’ve been happy with the results that I’ve noticed and recommended it for those same reasons.- Richard S.

“The program has eliminated alot of scrolling through unwanted emails just to get to the emails that I need to review.” – Patricia B.

“I really like it and how it allows me to define what is and isn’t spam.” – Brent C.

“I think it’s a cool service. A service that needs a little work, but cool enough to tell others about it.” – Ronnie M.
“Everyone needs this.” – Cindi G.

“I think it is wonderful.” – Darlene B.

“I don’t know of any other service that does this, and it seems like such a perfect solution.”- Robin L.

“You’ve tamed the red tide of junk mail in here. I see the real results in 1.5 days, literally within a day and a half, all the mail I want is in my in-box, and the stuff I don’t is in the pending folder.”- Andre L.

We’ve been busy here at Boxbe HQ making improvements to our service to make Boxbe easier to use and better integrated into your email workflow.

Here are some of the features we’ve just launched:

Always allow approved guests

Wondering why some messages from approved senders weren’t making it to your inbox? The new system allows messages from approved senders even if they fail authentication.

A simpler Guest List to make your life easier.

Universal Guest List

Use Boxbe’s convenient list of retailers, mailing lists, banks, social networks and other automated senders (no marketing or advertising emails, of course). It’s one more way Boxbe helps you save time.

Courtesy Notices are now optional

Many of you told us you don’t want to send Courtesy Notices to people not on your Guest List. They are now optional and they give you more control.

Choose who receives courtesy notices here.

Feedback?

Thanks for using Boxbe and we hope you like our new features. We love your feedback and we live on it. Please let us know what you think by responding to this email or emailing us at support@boxbe.com.

As we’re winding down for a 4th of July here in the US, it seemed like a good time to mention some of the recent articles written about us. Here are a few recent mentions that Boxbe has had in the blogosphere and by Fox Business News and the gray lady.

Struggling to Evade the Email Tsunami – The New York Times
Boxbe got a brief mention in this article from Randall Stross about people that are trying to get out from under their excessive email. No solutions for all the problems yet, but we’re trying :-).

Banish Those Pesky Spam and Phishing E-mails That Clog Up Your Inbox – Fox Business News
Fox Business New writer Donna Fuscaldo plays up Boxbe’s leveraging social networking to combat spam and phishing. “The free service, which works with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Outlook, lets users create a list of approved people who can send e-mail, similar to how instant messaging and social networking works.”

A Tale of Two Spammers and a Nice Solution
Now, here’s an interesting use of Boxbe to measure how many emails are sent from a couple of legitimate marketers. Giving out your Boxbe Public Email Address is demonstrated perfectly in this personal account by George Bounacos.

photo from flickr user Mr Magoo ICU

Update 2:13 PM We are back up. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Update – we are taking a bit longer than anticipated. Please stand by.

Starting at 12:45 pm PDT. We’ll be back soon.

Last night we had a service outage for our Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail service. After diagnosing the problem with the good folks down at Yahoo!, we have fixed the issues that caused the outage.

Essentially, due to a rapid increase in Boxbe users, Boxbe was shut out of using Yahoo! Mail’s API. Fortunately, we devised a way to make our service work better with Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail re-enabled Boxbe to access your account early this afternoon and the service should be up and running right now.

Thanks to our friends down at Yahoo! that helped us get Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail up and running again.

It will take us some time to catch up with all the email in your account, but we anticipate that everything will be running smoothly and back to normal in the next day or so.

We’re really sorry for the interruption in Boxbe service and hope that you didn’t receive too much unwanted mail in the mean time.

The silver lining to the service outage is that it gave us an opportunity adopt new practices to scale Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail to make our service available to even more users.

Update 3: 3:40 PM May 6, 2008
We’re back!!

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail is up and running. We’re sorry again for this inconvenience. We’ll post a further explanation later and measures that we are taking to avoid future outages.

(more…)

We moved from our Potrero digs a few months ago to our new “convenient to public transit” location downtown a couple of months ago and we thought it was time to have a little party.

I took a lot of pictures at the event and I’m sharing them below. The new office is indeed warmer as a result. Thanks to everyone who came and joined in the fun.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Full Set on Flickr

A big thank you to our friends over at Yahoo! Developer Network for making Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail an Editor’s Pick in the Yahoo! Gallery today.

Yahoo! Gallery, in case you didn’t know, is the site that Yahoo! uses to show off sites and services that use Yahoo! technologies. As you all know, Boxbe integrates tightly with Yahoo! Mail, making it so you don’t have to leave Yahoo! Mail to use the Boxbe service.

You may not know that we use the awesome Yahoo! Mail API to power Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail. Without the API, Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail wouldn’t be so nicely integrated with Yahoo! Mail.

What’s an API?

Sometimes living in the world of developers, we forget that most normal folks don’t know what an API is. Wikipedia’s definition is

“An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.”

Ok, that probably didn’t help much…

Essentially, an API is the way we access your Yahoo! Mail account with Yahoo!’s (and your) blessing. We use tools Yahoo! has built for people outside the company to enhance their existing services.

The folks at Yahoo! know that they can’t be all things to all people so they let companies like ours further individualize their services.

Yahoo! Gallery Pick

We’re happy that our Yahoo! Mail product has been made a pick on the Yahoo! Gallery.

Thanks again, Yahoo!

We’ve got a bunch of new features in the pipeline, but I almost forgot to mention some refinements we’ve made to the site recently.

Email Addresses page

We’ve made it a lot easier to update email addresses that you are using with Boxbe. By going to your Email Addresses page, you can maintain, enable, disable or add new email addresses to be protected by Boxbe.

To protect a new email address, you can either add it at the top of the Email Addresses page

or from your Dashboard page.

Once you type the email address in, you’ll be guided through the process to protect that email address using Boxbe.

We hope this makes it easier to add email addresses to your Boxbe account. If you have any problems or difficulties with this or any other feature, send email to support@boxbe.com.

Our VP of Corporate Development (and all around nice guy), Mark Benerofe was briefly interviewed today on American Public Media’s Marketplace program.

Now, he wasn’t talking about Boxbe on Marketplace, but we love Mark so, we thought it was worth mentioning here.

The story, What ever happened to Netscape?, is on today’s episode Marketplace. Mark was quoted because he was around back then (ok, I was too, but Mark was actually working online) and worked at some places like Prodigy and Sony Online.

The story gives a history of Netscape which is intertwined pretty tightly with the history of the web. Netscape is largely gone, but lives on in the form of Firefox, the browser of choice for many of us today.

You’ll need Real Player to listen to the segment, but can download an MP3 of the whole show here. The story starts at about 13 minutes in.

Read

Boxbe CEO, Thede Loder will be presenting at AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC. The conference is a

“two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.”

Thede will be presenting our vision of the future of email during the “CEO Showcase – Web Services and Measurement” session at 11:10 Tuesday morning. Thede will be joined by Boxbe COO, Corbett Barr and EVP of Corporate Development, Mark Benerofe. If you are at the conference, please say hi to Thede, Corbett and Mark.

Join our growing team!

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.

Boxbe is looking for a .NET C# engineer with Microsoft Outlook programming experience. Boxbe has developed a client-side version of our e-mail management system which integrates with Outlook as an add-in. This developer will be supporting an initial release of code and continuing to improve and extend on the original framework.

Details after the link –
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