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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
The site will be down from 4:00 PM until 7:00 PM Pacific Time. We will not process any email during that time. We apologize for any inconvenience.
[update: ok, actually we are down now.]
It’s been a little quiet here on the blog of late as I’ve just gotten back from a bit of a holiday. Posting will resume with some regularity today.
The team was quite busy while I was gone and we’ll have lots of good things to talk about very soon.
Glad to be back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once a month we get the Boxbe board of directors together to review our plans and progress (more on this later). This month, I happened to be in the office (I’m in Seattle most of the time and our office is in San Francisco). Being the aspiring photog, I took a few shots of the meeting in action.
Esther Dyson been a member of our board for some time, but this is the first time I’ve been down while she was in the office. It was great to finally meet her.
Esther has been a huge driver of a number of internet companies and technologies and has invested in a number of early internet startups including Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, Orbitz and of course, Boxbe. She wrote Release 1.0, an influential technology newsletter that has since been sold to O’Reilly.
Esther currently writes for the Huffington Post.
Steve Jurvetson is a member of our board and is a managing director of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson, a leading VC firm in the Valley. Steve’s previous investments have included Hotmail, Interwoven and Kana.
Corbett Barr is Boxbe’s co-founder and COO. You can find more about Corbett here.
Thede Loder’s the boss, our venerable CEO and cofounder of the company. More about Thede here and here.
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.
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.
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.
(more…)
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.
Stay tuned.
Should your ISP be able to determine what email lands in your inbox? We don’t think so and neither does Slashdot.
Two recent posts by Bennett Haselton on Slashdot illustrate the problems with the approach that Goodmail and Hotmail have for certifying senders. Bennett’s take is that if you are the little email list owner, small time email marketer or have the wrong political views, you could be shut out of this brave new world of pay-per-email. Most of the little guys can’t or won’t pay fees to be “certified” by either company.
As someone who uses email to manage both my personal and business life, the question I have to ask myself is, “Can I trust my ISP to make decisions for me about who can reach me?” Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question. I do believe that they want to decrease the amount of spam their users receive, but I think this is the wrong way to do it.
Boxbe differs from both Hotmail and Goodmail in two fundamental ways. With Hotmail and Goodmail, the money collected goes to your ISP and they alone determine who can circumvent their spam filter. With Boxbe, the bulk of the money goes to the person who receives the email, and it’s the same person that ultimately controls who reaches their inbox.
From a business perspective, Goodmail must seem like a great idea. If someone came along and said, “Hey, we can curb your spam problem and you can make money while you’re doing it,” I could see how it might be hard to say no. But at some point that misalignment of interests is going to play itself out.
The EFF put it best with its position on Goodmail and the whole notion of pay-per-email:
Goodmail reduces the incentive for ISPs to improve spam filters, much less to give end users more control of the filters. It increases the incentives for ISPs to overblock, since they make money when more senders sign up for Goodmail.
Bottom line: they decide who can send you email while at the same time they solicit “protection money” from senders willing to pay.
So, we’ve got a different philosophy about how this should work. If you’re a Boxbe member, you know we don’t think that payment to bypass a spam filter is a bad thing. It’s our raison d’être.
We believe people should have choices in who they receive email from. More importantly, we believe if money is going to change hands to reach you, you should get most of it. It’s your inbox, you decide who you can trust.
Web 2.0 video interviewer extraordinaire, Eddie Codel spent the afternoon in Boxbe offices two weeks ago talking to Thede Loder, Boxbe CEO about our service. Thede explains the ins and outs of Boxbe and gives Eddie the low down on what we’re all about.
Click below to watch the video.
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.