Boxbe Blog

Today, we’re announcing that our Boxbe for Outlook add-in is available to everyone for download. While it still has some rough edges, unlike a lot of other betas, we’ve been testing this add-in both internally and with a sizable number of beta testers for several months.

What is Boxbe for Outlook?

We’ve encapsulated all the functionality of the Boxbe website into an easy to use plugin for use with Microsoft Outlook.

Following is a little introduction to our latest product, Boxbe for Outlook.

Automatic Guest List Creation

The Boxbe for Outlook plugin looks through your list of contacts, past emails and email messages that you have sent to others, to create your Guest List quickly and get you started using Boxbe.

Once you have created your Guest List, email from people on your Guest List will go directly to your Inbox as they have before, while email from people that are not on your Guest List will go to your boxbe Waiting List folder.

Waiting List and Junk Ratings

If someone emails you that is not on your Guest List, that message is sent to your Waiting List folder and Boxbe determines how likely that message is to be spam.

Messages are rated on a scale from 1 to 10 on their likelihood that they are spam. Messages that score low are less likely to be spam and messages that score high are more likely to be spam.

Boxbe Junk Ratings quickly separate the good from the bad.

Fast Setup, Easy to Use

Depending on the size of your list of contacts and mailboxes, setup usually takes a couple of minutes. Once you are set up, adding new senders to your Guest List is a snap. We add a toolbar to Outlook that gives you quick access to the tools you’ll use after setup.

Approve Senders
Clicking “Add Sender” will add the sender of the email that you are currently reading to your Guest List. Adding to your Guest List ensures that that person can easily email you again.

Approve Domains
If you get a lot of email from a particular domain (example: your company or an organization that you belong to), you can quickly add the domain to your Guest List as well.

Protect multiple email addresses

One of the best things about Boxbe for Outlook is that you can protect any or all of the email addresses that you access via Microsoft Outlook. The Guest List that you create for one email address will work across all the email accounts that you choose for Boxbe to protect.

Get Boxbe for Outlook

You can get Boxbe for Outlook by signing up for Boxbe or adding an email address to your existing Boxbe account here.

System requirements:
Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007
Windows Vista or Windows XP

We hope you like the new plugin but if you have any difficulty using Boxbe for Outlook or have any questions, email us support@boxbe.com.

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.

Sort messages easily

We’ve added the Boxbe junk score to the subject line of all messages in your Waiting List.

Sorting by subject will help you find messages that are less likely to be junk.

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

We launched two enhancements yesterday afternoon to the Boxbe Quarantine: Junk Ratings and Message Search. Both features are designed to help you get through your quarantine folder more quickly and easily.

Junk Ratings

Our new junk rating is a way to make sifting through your quarantine easier. We’ve rated messages on a scale of one through ten based on what we think is more or less likely to be email that you would want.

Messages are also color coded like a stop light for quick scanning.

Green = least likely to be junk mail.
Yellow = somewhat likely to be junk mail.
Red = most likely junk mail.

As no spam filter is perfect, the junk rating numbers are meant as a guide to help you get through your quarantine more quickly. However, like any guide, use your own judgment when managing your quarantine.

Message Search

We’ve added the ability to search senders and subjects to find messages, senders or domains that you might want to approve. This search does not include the contents of the messages, rather just senders and subjects.

Message search works with the other filters on top of your quarantine, so you can specify dates and status as part of your search.

We hope you like our new enhancements.

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.

[Editor's Note: While this method of filtering still works for integrating Boxbe and Gmail together, we've improved the process. Take a look at this post for further instructions.]
Updated: Friday, May 11, 2007

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned that Boxbe is here to enhance your email, not replace it.

Boxbe can optimize your Gmail account to receive the messages you truly want to receive.

Assuming you have already added your Gmail ‘contacts’ and verified your Gmail account, here’s how to use Boxbe to screen email arriving in your Gmail account.

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Just in time for the weekend - we’ve made some enhancements that y’all had been asking for.

Message Preferences

Under message preferences, we’ve made a couple of tweaks:

First, you can now disable the header information on forwarded messages when either the sender is pre-approved, or the message was manually forwarded from your quarantine.

Second, you can choose whether forwarded messages are sent from “forward@boxbe.com” or the original sender’s address. This should make it easier to sort messages in your inbox.

Domain Approval

To make domain approval a little bit easier, any mail sent from sub-domains will be subject to the policy of the top-level domain (unless a specific entry exists for the sub-domain). For instance, mail sent from “bounces.amazon.com” will be subject to the policy for “amazon.com.”

Approval List Search

We know your approval list is long (I’ve got 500 senders approved myself) and finding who’s on your list and who’s not can be hard. Senders in your approved list can now be searched by name in addition to email address.

Gratuitous puppy photo by mcsixth

I’ll be representing Boxbe in Austin, TX for the annual SXSW Conference today through next Tuesday.

I would love to meet up if you want to learn more about how to get rid of your unwanted email or if you have any questions, complaints, concerns, or praise for Boxbe. Give me a shout while we’re all in Austin - randy@boxbe.com.

Tags - SXSW, SXSWi, SXSW2007