Boxbe Blog

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.

We get praise and love from our adoring fans on a regular basis, but one consistent request is to make getting email from real humans easier.

Keeping your Guest List up to date isn’t an easy job. When friends change jobs or their ISPs, their email addresses change with them.

Boxbe helps you get email from people who matter to you. The problem is, you don’t always know who is going to matter to you.

Today, I’m happy to announce a feature to make using Boxbe a lot easier.

Friends

Who are your friends? If you are like me, I have hundreds of contacts on my Boxbe Guest List. Some of them are email addresses from companies like Amazon or Facebook.

The bulk of my Guest List, however, is composed of friends, family and co-workers. We’ve consolidated this group of people into a group called “Friends.”

Friends of friends

So, why should you designate someone as a friend?

If you mark someone as a friend on your Guest List and they are a Boxbe member, anyone that they have designated as a friend can email you as well.

This takes a little of the difficulty of having to update your Guest List to ensure delivery of messages from your friends. You don’t have to mark them as a friend and you can block them if it’s someone you don’t want to hear from.

How it works

As an example, this is what happens when I add Mark as a friend.

When I add Mark as a friend, all of his friends can then email me without taking a test or paying a fee. If we have a lot of mutual friends, and he updates a change in their information first, I won’t have to.

We’re adhering to the proverb that many hands make light work.

Privacy

While we’re extending your Guest List to your friends, we won’t show others a list of who you have made a friend. The only way someone will know who your friends are is if they email them. Any email that you receive from a Friend of a Friend will be marked as such.

Here is how it will look in Yahoo! Mail:

Feedback?

We’re pretty happy with what we’ve released, but please let us know if there is anything we can do to make it better.

We’re constantly thinking of ways to make Boxbe easier to use and think this will help you get emails from people who matter to you most.

We launched Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail back in the fall. Here is a quick overview of how it works.

Boxbe Waiting List

No need to come to the Boxbe Web site to view messages on your Waiting List. 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.

This makes it easier to find messages from senders that you might want to add to your Guest List. Additionally, you can easily search messages in the Waiting List using Yahoo! Mail’s search tool.

Approve Guests within Yahoo! Mail

If you decide a message isn’t junk, clicking the “Approve” link from within the message in the Waiting 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.

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail is easy to set up and it’s absolutely free.

(Not a Yahoo! Mail user? Boxbe works with Gmail and a plugin for Microsoft Outlook is currently in beta testing.)

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.

Beyond Email 2.0

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.

Boxbe Guest List

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.

Boxbe cleans up your inbox

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.

It works with your existing email

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!

Never miss an important message

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.

Give spammers the heave-ho

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.

In a nutshell

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.

Domain names

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.

How to add domains to your Guest List

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.

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

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.

Yesterday, I mentioned we’ve revved our account home to make the site easier and more usable. I wanted to save one special feature to call out specifically today.

All Boxbe members now have the ability to send personalized invites to enable friends to use the service. We encourage your to tell your friends about the decrease in spam sent to your inbox, how your productivity has increased, and how your teeth are whiter (ok, maybe not the last one).

Currently, we’re limiting the number of invites to make sure our servers can handle the weight.

Inviting people to Boxbe equips your friends with the best spam protection available on the web and it enables us to attract advertisers to the service. Boxbe is powered by people and we’d love for your help in spreading the word.

Send Invites

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.

Here’s an oft-requested little feature to make using Boxbe a little bit easier.

We’ve added an option to auto-approve senders who take a test to reach you. The idea is, once someone proves that they are not an automated sender, they will be able to reach you again.

While we’ve turned this feature on by default, you can easily turn it off by going to account preferences and deselecting the box.

We hope you like this new feature and if you have any difficulties, please let us know.

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.

(more…)

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

The personal access price is one of the key technologies we use to help people remove unwanted and unsolicited email. Effectively, it puts a price tag on your attention. Senders who are not pre-approved must either take a short test or pay a small fee to reach you.

When Boxbe collects a fee, we share with you the amount you specify. You can donate the funds you collect to a charity of your choice (we make it easy), or keep them for your own use.

Personal Access Price

So, why a personal access price? There are a lot of solutions out there for refining the contents of your inbox. Most solutions center around spam detection and removal. But spam detection doesn’t really work if your goal is to eliminate unwanted email.

Besides the obvious arms race between spammers and anti-spam tools, we believe that the actual definition of spam is a personal one. To me, spam is unwanted email. Unwanted email is any email that didn’t add some value to my day. Rather, those emails cost me something, my time.

People ask, aren’t you just another spam solution? In short, no. Boxbe makes it easier to receive valuable emails and decrease the emails you don’t want to receive. As a result, a delightful side effect of our service is spam removal.

Your time, your money

In the end, we’re trying enable people to take more control of their attention. Like Tivo and the iPod, we want you to have choices about how you spend your time. Life is too short to be dealing with unwanted email.

Boxbe helps you trade (and be compensated for) your time and attention. Your attention is valuable to advertisers if an offer you read influences what you or someone else later buys. If reading an offer makes you just slightly more likely to make or recommend a purchase, it may be worthwhile to send, even if an advertiser must pay.

We have more information about the personal access price in the FAQ.

By now, you know how the Boxbe system works. Sign up for a protected email address and only people that pay, prove they are human or you pre-approve get through to you. But what does it look like to the sender?

Pre-Approval

Setting up your pre-approval list is important to ensure people that you know and trust can still email you. The easiest way to do this is to upload your address book. We’ve made uploading your address book easy.

Non-Approved Senders

When you receive an email from someone you don’t know, an email is sent to the sender.

The email says the following:

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

The message you sent to randy@boxbe.com was not delivered.

randy@boxbe.com uses Boxbe to limit inbox access. You
are not pre-approved to deliver from randy_stewart@yahoo.com
and your message has been placed in a quarantine.

To complete delivery
——————–

Authenticate your message (click on link):
https://www.boxbe.com/crs/test?sender=sendersemail%40yahoo.com
&recipient=randy&40boxbe.com&qmlid=100100410780111986
&subject=Hi%20there

Pay a refundable(*) fee of USD $0.15 (click on link):
https://www.boxbe.com/ama/post_payment?sender=sendersemail%
40yahoo.com&recipient=randy%40boxbe.com
&qmlid=100100410780111986&subject=Hi%20there

(*) randy@boxbe.com has the choice to grant a refund.

About Boxbe
———–
Boxbe is a communications marketplace built on top of today’s
email. By using a price as a screen and letting you share your
interests, Boxbe helps you get the messages you want and
avoid the ones you don’t. Friends continue to reach you for free.

Get a cleaner, more useful inbox.
Join Boxbe today! Visit http://www.boxbe.com/

They can take a test to prove they are human or post a bond that you set. If you have allowed senders to take a test, your new friend will get a screen that looks like this:

[Click for full size image]

If not, they will be required to join and post the bond you have set.

[Click for full size image]

Setting the bond low will ensure that people won’t mind risking a few cents. This will, however, deter emails that you aren’t likely to want.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking about all the features Boxbe has to offer, but today we’ll start with the public forwarding address.

Public Forwarding Address

Your Boxbe public forwarding address is a protected email address. A message sent to your public forwarding address is sent to your real inbox only if the sender:

1. is pre-approved or “whitelisted” by you,
2. passes a test, or
3. pays a fee.

You can share or publish your public forwarding address online without concern because of this protection. The forwarding email address is very handy if you own a blog, a MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube account and would like people to be able to reach you outside those accounts.

Email on Steroids

Since most people have existing email addresses at both home and work or school, you might be asking yourself, why do I need another email address? A Boxbe address isn’t meant to replace those addresses. It’s meant to enhance them.

Personally, I’d never put my Yahoo! or Gmail email address on the internet as it is likely to attract email that I don’t want. Boxbe’s public forwarding address provides a way for me to post my email address anywhere on the internet and not worry about unwanted email.

I use my Boxbe address when posting in online discussion groups or communities, posting to my blog or commenting on someone else’s. I also use my Boxbe address on MySpace and basically anywhere I want people to be able to reach me. Best of all, it’s a forwarding address, so the emails that I want will be delivered to my regular inbox.

Who should use the forwarding email address?

I’ve mentioned a few uses of the forwarding email address for social media sites (blogging, MySpace, discussion boards), but we realize that not everyone participates on those kinds of sites. Boxbe can protect anyone’s email address from unwanted email. Chances are, even if you’ve not posted your email address in a public place, you receive email that you don’t want.

At our core, we’re here to cut down on the email you don’t want to receive and encourage the email that you do want to receive.