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.

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.

Here’s a little Flickr gallery from our launch day. Months of work culminated in a very intense day of moving all our changes onto the live site.

A huge thanks to Om Malik, Sonja Thompson and Eric Lai for covering our launch of our redesign and new Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Outlook plugin. I’ve included links and quotes below.

Three Cool Add-Ons for Microsoft Outlook
Om Malik
“[Boxbe] has come up with a Facebook-style, invite-only guest list that allows you to tightly control and manage who gets into your inbox and who gets left behind. In other words, it lets you you easily create an email guest list so that you can make sure you receive email messages from people who matter to you — friends, family, co-workers and even entire domains.”

Say good-bye to spam for good with Boxbe
Sonja Thompson
“About a month ago, I discovered Boxbe… by accident. It was one of those rare “wow” moments that happens when you run across something that you haven’t seen before and that you think has unlimited potential.”

E-mail ‘guest list’ service Boxbe adds Yahoo Mail, beta Outlook integration
Eric Lai
“Boxbe scans users’ contact lists and archived e-mails to create buddy lists of friends, family and co-workers whose messages are allowed to pass through its virtual gateway.”

Email nods to social networking with ‘Email by invitation’

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – November 29, 2007: Boxbe, a company that lets consumers regain control of their incoming email, today announced a social utility for email. Boxbe’s free service gives the millions of users of Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail the ability to protect and ensure the delivery of messages from friends, family, co-workers and even entire domains, such as: amazon.com, americanexpress.com or yourfamilyname.com. With the release of Boxbe’s new service, users of Yahoo! Mail, Outlook and Gmail can now create an ‘email guest list’, which ensures that they receive messages only from those people who matter to them.

“Going beyond Email 2.0 Boxbe’s guest list makes email more like instant messaging or social networking: People who want to reach you must first get your permission,” said Thede Loder, co-founder and president of Boxbe. “Boxbe allows you to treat your friends’ email with the respect it deserves, and reject any message that tries to invade your inbox without an invitation from you.”

In the same way that social networks require users to accept friends to share profiles and exchange messages, the Boxbe guest list allows users to control which messages can get through and which need permission. Setting up a guest list is simple:

• The system imports the addresses you already have saved and allows you to select those you want to accept messages from
• anyone not on the guest list who sends you a message receives an invitation to join your guest list, and remains on a waiting list until you verify the message and approve the sender.

This process stops spammers and brings order back to email. Unverified messages are not arbitrarily blocked or deleted; they are simply held in a waiting list where they can be viewed or forwarded at anytime. Consumers can also choose which businesses can reach them by name or by category; they can specify with total privacy which marketers can reach them and what products they are interested in.

According to a research report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half of email users (55 percent) say they have lost trust in email because of spam.

“Email is such an essential tool we use in all areas of our lives, personal and professional, yet it has not kept pace with the way that people communicate these days,” continued Loder. “We are committed to working with companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google to restore people’s faith in email by screening out unwanted messages and letting in those that matter.”

Boxbe is able to offer this innovative service in part due to the “opening-up” of some of the industry’s leading e-mail services. For example, in March 2007, Yahoo! announced the opening of its Yahoo! Mail Web Services, a multi-tiered set of open Web services that allow developers to build software and services around the world’s No. 1 Web mail platform.

“I invested in Boxbe because they have created an innovative service that makes email usable again. Consumers have always had to deal with inboxes that are clogged with irrelevant information. With Boxbe, now they can focus only on those emails which really matter, from those people who really matter to them,” said Esther Dyson, Boxbe investor and board member.

Boxbe is backed by leading investors: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the original investor in: Hotmail (acquired by MSFT), Skype (acquired by EBAY), Baidu (BIDU), and Overture (acquired by YHOO), among many others; and Esther Dyson, an influential commentator on the impact of emerging technologies and markets, and an investor in Flickr (acquired by Yahoo!), Medstory (acquired by Microsoft), Brightmail (acquired by Symantec) and Postini (acquired by Google).

About Boxbe
Boxbe lets you easily create an email guest list that ensures you receive messages from people and companies that matter to you. Boxbe is completely free, and takes only a few minutes to set up. Boxbe’s free service works with most popular email products and services, including Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. Boxbe is a privately held company, headquartered in San Francisco, CA and online at: www.boxbe.com.

Media inquiries
Andrea Heuer
Consort Partners
boxbe@consortpartners.com
Tel: +1 (917) 886-5113

New logo, better functionality, Yahoo! Mail and a beta Microsoft Outlook plugin.

Come on in, kick the tires and let us know what you think. I’ll be posting more here over the next few days.

Thede Loder, Boxbe’s CEO, will be giving an overview of Boxbe at John Battelle and O’Reilly Media‘s Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco.

He’ll be presenting during the “Edge Companies – Presentations from the Edge” workshop session today at 11:30-12:45. The purpose of the session is to introduce folks to up and coming companies such as ours.

If you are at the conference, stop by and say hi to Thede and let him know what you think about Boxbe.

Having squashed all the bugs and polished up its usability, we’ve almost completed the beta test of our service with Yahoo! Mail . Over the next several days, we’re rolling the service out to existing users and barring no difficulties, opening up the service for all to use.

Boxbe Waiting List

No need to come to the Boxbe website to view your waitlisted messages. We’ll move all your unwanted messages into a new folder in your existing Yahoo! Mail account.

Your Boxbe Waiting List folder will contain all the messages from guests you haven’t yet approved.

Approve Guests within Yahoo! Mail

If you decide a message isn’t junk, clicking the “Approve” link from within the message in the Wait List adds the sender to your Guest List and moves the message into your Yahoo! Mail inbox.

Automatically add new guests

Finally, when you send an email to a new friend, you have the option of adding them automatically to your Guest List. The idea here is that you don’t want people you’ve emailed to have take a test or pay a fee to email you back.

Launching ‘soon’

We’re pretty excited about launching Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail to the world. Our integration into Yahoo! Mail will help a lot of users boil down their email to just those messages that matter to them most.

We’ll keep you posted here when we launch to everyone.

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

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.

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.

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.

Requirements after the link.
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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.

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.

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.

Contact us at careers@boxbe.com if you think you would be a good fit.

Current positions available are:

• Senior Java Architect / Team Lead Engineer
• Web User Interface Designer / Engineer

Descriptions are after the link.
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NOTE:Boxbe is discontinuing support for adding a Gmail account in this way.

Edited February 4, 2008

We’ve just made integrating Boxbe with Gmail a heck of a lot simpler. I had planned to put a screen shot here, but it’s so easy, it seemed like a waste of bandwidth :-).

Starting today, we’ve enabled single click Gmail installation from your account home page. We’ve taken all the steps involved and reduced them to them to a few fields and a button.

Gmail integration is accessible directly here and is permanently accessible from your account home page.

What this does

We posted back in March about a method to set up Gmail to redirect email into Boxbe’s filter as well as setting up a signature to ensure redelivery of messages. The only thing we’ve changed is that we have automated the process for you.

Existing Members

If you are an existing member and you already use Gmail forwarding, you do not need to make any changes. We have automated the work you’ve already done.

If you were eager to see the changes we’ve made and already clicked the button, no worries. You will merely overwrite the changes you made previously, but the filter should still work.

Use Boxbe with Gmail

If you haven’t integrated Boxbe filtering for your Gmail account yet, we hope this makes it much easier.

Note to Gtalk users:
We’ve discovered a bug where Gtalk chats are not logged in your communications history. Existing conversations will not be affected. We hope to have this remedied soon.
[edited: Friday, May 11, 2007]

We have fixed the issue and we will push a fix out as soon as possible.
Monday, May 14, 2007

The issue has been resolved
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

You asked for it, we delivered it. This afternoon we pushed out a a plethora of often requested enhancements and fixes to your Boxbe Quarantine folder. These enhancements are designed to add functionality and make your quarantine folder easier to use. Below is a list of the upgrades we’ve released.

Sorting

Ooh, this is a biggie. Want to find all your blocked messages quickly? How about all messages from your Aunt Petunia’s new Gmail address?

Now you can sort messages based on Sender, Subject, Status and Date, and we’ve implemented it with healthy serving of AJAXy goodness so you don’t have to reload the page.

Quick Forward and Approve

We’re big fans of efficiency here at Boxbe so we take any opportunity to cut two steps down to one. If you just want to forward a message out of your quarantine, we’ve added a drop down to accomplish that and a few other time saving activities like approving the sender or their whole domain as well.

Bulk Forward and Approve

Coupled in nicely with our new sorting mechanism comes our bulk forward and approve tool. If you’ve found all of Aunt Petunia’s messages, you can now select them and forward them with the click of a button. Or if you want to delete all messages with the Subject “=?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCSkZFRD,” we’ve made it easy by placing these buttons at the top and bottom of your quarantine folder.

Multiple pages

Do you get a lot of mail in your quarantine like me? In any given week, I get over 300 messages in my quarantine. If I want to look at more than a week, that list can get really big.

Going forward, you can set the number of messages that appear on a single page to make looking at those long lists a little bit easier and a little bit faster. The quarantine will remember what you last set the number at so you won’t have to change it twice.

Feedback

We think these UI enhancements will improve your experience on Boxbe and will increase your efficiency when working in your quarantine.

If you have any questions about the changes or other feature requests, drop us a line at service@boxbe.com or to me at randy@boxbe.com.