Boxbe Blog

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.

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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Eric Rice and Robert Scoble, a couple of bloggers who would benefit from using Boxbe.

I’ve been blogging for almost two years now and I love to hear from readers. Comments are a great place for people to continue the conversation, but often I’d like to take some conversations offline.

Most people don’t want to post their email address on their blog for fear of spam. If you do post your email address on your blog, that fear is realized.

I’ve seen lots of ways people get around not posting their actual email address like typing out “randy at boxbe dot com” or “randy at the URL you see above.” Worse, you might have a form that people can fill out to reach you, which doesn’t really make readers feel all warm and fuzzy when they want to reach you.

If you want to reach me, here’s a good old fashioned “mailto:” link - randy@boxbe.com.

I can post this email address anywhere I’d like:

• blogs,
• forums,
• comments,
• Twitter,
• or anywhere I’d want someone to be able to reach me later.

Here’s how it works

When people I haven’t pre-approved email me for the first time, they have to prove they are not an automated sender. I don’t think that is too much to ask. If they are a real person, I approve them to send me more emails by clicking “Approve” right in the message. I’m pretty friendly like that.

Use Gmail?

If you use Gmail, we’ve got you covered. With our Gmail integration, we’ve made it even easier to get a clean email inbox. Go here, plug in your Gmail address, click the button and you’re done.

Why use Boxbe?

Bloggers need to talk to their adoring fans and blogging isn’t a one way street. Blogging is about conversation. Many of those conversations can occur within or amongst blogs, but not everyone wants their opinion, question, or letters of love and devotion to be part of the public domain.

You want to put your email in a public place but you don’t want to be buried in spam. Boxbe can help you do that.

Over the past few months, I’ve talked in the blog about Boxbe’s mission, new features, your attention and about the world of email in general. I haven’t talked about who should use Boxbe and why.

What is Boxbe?

To review what we’re all about, Boxbe is a platform to help you regain control of your attention and the center of most people’s attention is their email inbox. From Thede’s opening post describing Boxbe:

Boxbe is (at its heart) a new kind marketplace. What you trade through Boxbe (or give away, the choice is yours), is “access to yourself”. For your work and personal correspondence, you can let access be free. For others, we help you set a price. Our goal is to give you control over your inbox, and through that, your time.

While I receive somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 emails a day (not including spam), I know many other people whose daily email volume reaches into the multiple of hundreds. Of course, not every email needs to be responded to, but most emails need to be read.

If you receive a lot of email, I bet you also receive a lot of unwanted email. Some might call that unwanted email spam. Others might not call it anything all as it is adrift in the barren wasteland that is their unopened, unattended to email inbox.

Boxbe - Who is it good for?

The obvious answer to me is everyone. I haven’t met anyone who says, “You know, I just don’t receive enough email.” But, there are some specific people and groups of people who might benefit more by using Boxbe.

From time to time, I’ll be talking about groups of people or specific individuals that we think would benefit from using Boxbe. Some of those specific groups of people will include bloggers, podcasters, politicians, small business owners, and anyone whose livelihood is utterly dependent on getting important email.

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.

I wanted to thank everyone who took the time last week for going over to the Valleywag “Hottest Company in Silicon Valley” poll. We had a great turn out with 92 votes, which would have put us at number 6 in between Zillow and Joost. Sadly, we were disqualified from the competition because we asked for help on the blog.

We did, however, get a special mention on their results post.

“By the way, a special prize to Tesla, Boxbe, Bebo and iStockphoto, the four companies which mobilized their employees or users to blitz the poll: we removed them from the final count, but they deserve credit for the enthusiasm of their campaigns. There is no appeal.”

It’s good to be loved.

Boxbe has been included in a poll on Valleywag today to select the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. We might be a little north, but we’d sure love your vote! We’re in with some pretty stiff competition from a lot bigger companies, so tell your friends, neighbors, coworkers, heck, anyone who will listen to go vote for us on Valleywag!

VOTE HERE

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Yesterday, I posted some male names that were still available from Boxbe, today, I’ll do the same for all the females in the audience.

I also mentioned yesterday that it really stinks getting an obscure email address. None of your friends can remember it easily. If you are meeting people for the first time, giving SusanB9875 doesn’t really stick in short term memory.

There is a counter view to all of this, however.

I worked at Yahoo! back in the 1990’s and I was fortunate (so I thought) to get randy@yahoo.com. Very memorable and (unfortunately) highly spammed. Sometimes bulk emailers resort to merely sending email to X @ Y.com, replacing X with every name in a dictionary. As you might imagine, I received a lot of unwanted email and sadly, I gave up the address due to that burden.

Having a good name at Boxbe, on the other hand, won’t fall victim to the same shenanigans. As I’ve mentioned before, you only receive email from people in your Boxbe address book, people who pass a test or pay a fee, so you’re only getting the email that you want.

Without further ado, here are some of the popular women’s names still available on Boxbe.

• Mary
• Patricia
• Linda
• Maria
• Susan
• Margaret
• Dorothy
• Betty
• Helen
• Sandra
• Donna
• Carol

More after the link

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I hate seeing this:

I’m a bit of an internet geek. I’ve been online for a long time as long time readers and old friends will know, and one of my pet peeves is being late to any hot new site.

I join (and have joined) a lot of web sites and getting “randy” or “randystewart” or even “rstewart” as a login on a site is always goal and it always bugs me whenever I can’t get one of those names. Getting Rstewar8945 is not my idea of a great login name or email address.

I’m telling you that to tell you this: While Boxbe has been adding members at a fair clip, we still have a number of great email addresses available.

If you are a Charles, Joseph or Thomas and are looking for that ultimate, easy to remember email address, today is your lucky day!

Here are some other male names that are still available:

• Donald
• Kenneth
• Edward
• Timothy
• Jose
• Walter
• Carl
• Roger
• Juan
• Jack
• Albert
• Gerald
• Samuel

Sign up for your great email address before its gone!

Tomorrow, we’ll be featuring all the women’s names that are still available.

More names after the link.

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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.

Our mention in the Economist and recent Gmail integration stirred up the blogosphere a bit. Here are a few of the reactions.

Working the Crowd - IT for Financial Services @ BC
“Instead of using filters, Boxbe has developed software that essentially acts like a “toll booth”"

Monetizing the Attention Economy - Madisonian.net
“…technologies enables the user to capture some of the value now “appropriated” by marketers and advertisers competing for their attention, and “free-riding” off of their attention data.”

Daily Round Up - Crowdsourcing
“Will only people who have something valuable to say make the effort to send a message to you?”

Another cool feature from Boxbe - Ronnie’s Tech Blog
“Boxbe is on a roll lately! They now have the ability to filter your Gmail account.”

Thanks everyone for your comments!

Gratuitous kitten photo by fofurasfelinas

[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

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.

Last Friday, we pushed a site redesign for the Boxbe main site. While no major functionality has changed, we think this makes it a little easier to find the things you’re looking for and is a bit easier on the eyes.

If you have comments about the new design or see any problems, send me email at randy@boxbe.com or comment below.

We think that Boxbe and bloggers are a natural fit. We like the idea that people can post their Boxbe address on their blogs without fear of unwanted emails. I love getting email from readers and I imagine many other bloggers would like to be reachable as well.

Here’s a quick roundup of bloggers talking about Boxbe.

• Cristian Eslava (en Espanol)
• MacBros Place
• Digital Guides, Hacks and Tips
• Accidental Events, Dreams and Travels

Thanks everyone! We hope you love the service.

In an earlier post, I mentioned a spammer who was phishing getting convicted and facing up to a 101 years in prison as a result. But what exactly is phishing?

Photo by Flickr user thermodynamix

Wikipedia defines phishing as

“a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures.”

In a nutshell, phishing is something criminals do to trick people into giving them sensitive information. The stolen information is then used by the criminal for further illicit activities.

Boxbe and phishing

So, what does Boxbe do about phishing? First, the only email that you receive when using Boxbe is from senders that you have approved, have passed a human test or have paid a fee. Second, we use two emerging industry standards, SPF and DomainKeys to increase the likelihood that the sender isn’t spoofing or faking their email address.

Is it a 100% solution? No. Unfortunately, we can’t guard against all forms of social engineering or deception. What we can do is guard against emails from entering your inbox that make false claims as to their point of origin. The rest is up to you.

Learn more about phishing

We suggest that everyone educate themselves against phishing. Here are some great places to learn more about phishing:

• Microsoft - Recognizing phishing scams and fraudulent emails
• Tips from Fraud.org
• Paypal Security Center
• CNET - How to avoid phishing scams