Boxbe Blog

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

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.

Who do you trust?

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.

Conflict of interest

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.

How Boxbe fits in

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.

image from Flickr user srish

Tim Ferris over at the Huffington Post posted a video as well as some tips from Robert Scoble about how to deal with 10,000 or more messages a day. Man… now, there’s email overload.

Robert’s tips center around Microsoft Outlook which he has been using since 1990 and include

• Keeping all Outlook .PST files under 2GB in size to optimize speed and prevent crashes.
• Removing infrequently used .PST files.
• Renaming or appending frequently-used folders to appear at the top of the list.
• Responding to fewer e-mail is the holy grail.

We’d love to help you with your email overload problem, Robert. We’ll talk soon about some work we’re doing with Outlook.

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.

In a previous post, we talked about how much time it takes to get rid of unwanted mail. Unlike email marketing, direct marketing via postal mail is expensive as they have printing and postage costs.

Email marketers still have to pay to acquire a list of email addresses and to design the email, but largely, the cost of email marketing is carried by the recipients (READ: you and me) in evaluating that email’s value. By charging marketers for your time, many marketers will refine the messages that they send.

But what makes us think marketers will pay? We think they will pay for your attention because they already do.

US Postal Service

I get a lot of mail in my (snail mail) mailbox every day. Usually, our small mailbox is stuffed full of mail. And most of that mail I didn’t request.

Typically, I get 3 kinds of unwanted mail:

• Grocery store inserts
• Catalogs
• Letters/Fliers

I was curious about how much marketers spend to reach me, so I started doing a little research online. Poking around a bit on the USPS website, I discovered their rate calculator for sending commercial mail. They divide commercial mail into several categories.

Standard Mail

Standard mail is the mail that doesn’t seem like mail at all. Standard mail is typically composed of loose fliers from grocery and other local stores, letters sent to “Resident” or any piece of mail that you receive that isn’t addressed to a person. Standard mail is big business for the USPS as it made up almost half of their revenue last year.

Using the USPS’ handy bulk postage calculator, I determined that it costs about $.16 for a 1.7 oz grocery store flyer via standard mail. Naturally, this doesn’t include printing costs, so this isn’t a total cost, but it is a good basis to work from.

Standard mail indiscriminately targets neighborhoods, cities and regions and isn’t targeted beyond the geographic boundaries.

Catalogs

By comparison to standard mail, catalogs are very expensive. By using the same calculator, I calculated my recently received catalogs of 6, 10 and 14 oz in weight, cost $.44, $.51 and $.57 respectively to send. Again, this doesn’t include printing, but where the grocery store flyer was printed on newsprint and unbound, the catalog from the furniture store was printed on high quality glossy paper, which is substantially more expensive.

Catalogs are more targeted, so in theory, the recipient might buy more from that retailer.

So, how much are you worth?

So, what does all this mean? By calculating one cost, bulk rates for direct mail marketing, we’ve established that marketers are willing to pay to get some of your attention. From my own non-scientific study of my mailbox, those marketers are paying somewhere in between $.16 and $.57 for each piece of mail sent.

While we aren’t planning on opening a direct mail division any time soon, we think some of that money ought to be going to you.

We’ve talked about the cost of unwanted email in previous posts, but what about unwanted paper or snail mail?

US Postal Service

In a given week, it’s safe to say that my household receives at least 3-5 credit card offers, 5 catalogs, 4 or 5 grocery fliers and scads of other mail that we never asked for. A very small percentage of the stack of mail is something that I either asked for or actually care about.

I know that I’m not alone in this. The US Postal Service, in their 2006 annual report, states that they send over 102 billion pieces of “Standard Mail” each year. Standard mail, by the way, is composed of loose fliers from grocery and other local stores, letters sent to “Resident” or any piece of mail that you receive that isn’t addressed to someone.

This number doesn’t include the 90 billion pieces of first class mail that is sent each year. First class mail is the regular addressed messages that you receive which could include hand written notes from your aunt or pictures of your 3 year old niece. Sadly, I don’t receive many of those kinds of messages, so most first class mail is unrequested as well.

The cost of uninvited mail

Unlike email, most postal mail must be closely inspected before you dispose of it. The dozens of credit card and mortgage offers I receive monthly contain sensitive information about me or my family. That information offers up an opportunity for identity theft. All of these messages need to be shredded. G

In a previous post about the cost to my time, I established some figures for the wages of the average American, I spend another 5 minutes a day disposing of postal mail and another 15 minutes a week at the shredder.

$18.50 an hour x 21 hours per year = $388.50.  

plus

15 minutes a week x 52 weeks * $18.50 = $240

Added together, unwanted mail costs you about $628 or 34 hours per year in lost time. Ouch.

Identity Theft?

Now, you could argue that I’m overly paranoid when it comes to shredding financial documents, but the cost of having your identity stolen is considerably higher. According to a study by the Identity Theft Resource Center, it takes on average about 330 hours to recover from identity theft.

330 hours x $18.50 = $6,105

There are about 10 million victims of identity theft per year in the US and according to the U.S. Department of Justice Statistics, identity theft is now passing up drug trafficking as the number one crime in the nation.

Long story short, buy a shredder folks.

What’s next?

I’ve looked at the costs of unwanted mail for individuals, but what about the companies that send it? Finally, I’ll end with some tips on how to lower the amount of unwanted mail you receive and help regain some of the your lost time and productivity.

photo by Flickr user MrBG

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.

For most of my career, I’ve had a salaried job that paid a set amount no matter how long I worked. The agreement is simple, you work 40+ hours a week, get paid a consistent weekly wage, but also receive benefits like health care, stock options, etc. With salaried positions, I never really thought about my hourly rate, and better yet, the actual dollar value of my time.

Recently, I started consulting, which tends to pay hourly, so my frame of mind changed. Any hour that I wasn’t working, I also wasn’t getting paid. What is my time worth? I started thinking more and more about the value of my time and figuring out the best ways to spend it.

What is the cost of your attention?

I did a little non-scientific study with a few friends and talked about their email usage. I asked, “How much time do you spend during the day getting rid of unwanted email?” The answers hovered around 5 to 10 minutes. So how much does wasting 5-10 minutes a day actually cost?

If you expand the low end (5 minutes) out over a year, the people in my non-scientific study spent about 21 hours a year hitting the delete key.

5 minutes x 5 days x 50 weeks = 21 hours

Now if your wages fall at the 2005 national average of $36,952 (according the Social Security Administration), manually processing that unwanted email cost you $384.93.

($36,952 a year / 50 weeks / 40 hours) x 21 hours = $384.93.  

To put that into perspective, $384.93 is enough to buy a top end iPod, with tax. If you make more than $37,000 a year or spend more than 5 minutes a day deleting email, your cost rises accordingly.

Now, I realize that this isn’t money that is coming out of most people’s pockets. As a salaried employee, however, this is time coming out of your day.

Given that, I suppose the real question is, what would you rather do with those 21 hours?

photo by Flickr member cmiper