Boxbe Blog

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.

Two terms we spent a little time talking about this year made the New York Times 2007 Buzzword List. The Times takes the last Sunday of every year to review the year. Now, there are a lot of end of the year lists, but the Buzzword list is unique, fun and informative.

Bacn

Bacn, as you recall, is “Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.”

Congrats to the Podcamp Pittsburgh folks for making “Bacn” one of 2007’s top buzzwords.

Email Bankruptcy

Email Bankruptcy is something most Boxbe users won’t ever have to declare, but we can’t guard against friends, family and colleagues expecting a response to every message they send you.

What you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response.

Lawrence Lessig and Fred Wilson both famously declared email bankruptcy in the last couple of years. We wish them a better, more productive email life in 2008.

Other tech related terms from this year - crowdsourcing, life streaming, tumblelog, lolcat and one for Mark (our VP of Corp Dev and former CNN producer), I-reporter.

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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.

The Associated Press is warning email users yesterday to be wary of coupons that they have received via email.

Instead of money saving deals, e-mailed coupons could lead recipients into “phishing” schemes where the consumer is redirected to a copycat site, whose real purpose is to siphon the user’s credit card information, passwords and other financial data, IBM Corp. security executive Christopher Rouland warned.

If you are a Boxbe member and have approved email from say Amazon.com, messages from a an address that claims to be from Amazon, but really aren’t, won’t make it through to your inbox.

Boxbe uses two email authentication methods (DKIM and SPF) to verify that the emailer is who they claim to be. DKIM and SPF are two email authentication standards backed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL. Boxbe blocks messages that come from senders who claim to be someone that they are not

Be safe out there this holiday season and let us worry about your email.
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image from Flickr user skrewtape.

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:

• 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

I’ve always been a bit of an analytics nerd, but I have to admit, Xobni looks pretty cool. And if you use Outlook, this might be the answer to your prayers.

…It’s inbox, backwards

Launched at this week’s TC40 here in San Francisco and backed an old pal of mine at YCombinator, Xobni brings analytics and metadata to your Outlook inbox.

Ever wonder how many times someone has emailed you? How about finding that attachment or phone number that is buried somewhere? Outlook isn’t exactly helpful.

Xobni seems to be answer to every place that Outlook is lacking. Fast search, data extraction. threaded conversations and quick attachment recovery round out Xobni’s Outlook offering. Looks like a pretty cool plugin.

Xobni’s website

More coverage

Techcrunch
Dan Farber
VentureBeat

Andrea Coombs at the Wall Street Journal tells us that we need to take control of our email and quotes some of our favorite people

Merlin Mann (43 Folders), David Allen (author of “Getting Things Done“) and Julie Morgenstern (author of numerous productivity books), all take potshots at our favorite medium, email.

Here are some highlights:

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We haven’t had too many email tips of late, but the blogosphere has plenty to hand out. I’ve collected some of the best.

How to Use Gmail over IMAP - Download Squad
It’s a bit tricky, but nevertheless, David Chartier over at Download Squad has instructions on how to set up Gmail to work over IMAP. Now, you will need another IMAP account somewhere else to make this work, but hey, if you love IMAP and Gmail, these are two great tastes that taste… well, you know.

How to write a 5 sentence email - Guy Kawasaki
Now, you know we love Guy Kawasaki and all his great advice so when he talks about the ten things you should learn in school, we take note. Number nine in particular caught my eye (and Merlin Mann, too), which was “How to write a five-sentence email.”

One final geek tip for today.

Move Outlook email to Mail.app - MacOSXHints.com
Any switchers out there? I know I’ve had to move email from Outlook to the Mac in the past and let me tell you, it’s not easy. If you’re handy with the Terminal, this tip is for you.

photo by Flickr user Nrbelex

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

Today Google acquired anti-spam and security company Postini. Postini offers a host of services for businesses around communications security, but the reason I mention them is they are best known for their hosted anti-spam solution. Sound familiar?

According to the Google blog, Google acquired Postini as Google Apps “needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community.”

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall quotes Google’s Eric Schmidt saying “With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users — they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations.”

More specifically, Bill Burnham thinks that this is a pretty clear signal that Google is going after Microsoft’s Exchange business.

What does Postini do for Google’s bottom line? Om Malik on GigaOm believes that Google’s acquisitions are mirroring Cisco’s “buy and grow” strategy that built them into the networking giant they are today.

Finally, Fred Wilson (aka “A VC”) commented today on what Google ought to do with Postini post acquisition.

1 - allow me to search my quarantined mail…
2 - figure out how to stop grabbing verification emails…
3 - let me manage my quarantined mail in the gmail interface…
4 - let me see the reputation of the sender in the quarantined mailbox…

Thankfully, we’ve got Fred covered on 3 of his 4 requests (and we’ll have #3 for Yahoo! Mail soon).

Congrats to Postini on the acquisition.

More coverage of the Postini and Google announcement:

SearchEngineLand
Huffington Post
alarm clock

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.

If you need help with email etiquette, we don’t recommend using Stephen Colbert’s techniques. His guest in the clip below, Will Schwalbe, author of “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home,” on the other hand, could probably help you quite a bit.

Will Schwalbe has quite a bit more email etiquette advice on his blog, Think Before You Send including “Warming Cold Emails,” “Cautionary Tale About Threatening Emails” and his list of “Possibly Obnoxious Phrases.”

Ever thought about sending yourself a reminder, but you don’t really use Outlook or other calendaring systems?

Despite the fact that I use Apple’s built in iCal, often times I’ve thought that sending myself an email might be the best way to reach my future self (and yes, I could use iCal to do this, but what fun would that be?). Fortunately, an informative thread on Ask Metafilter has made several suggestions to email yourself in the future.

Emailing the Future

I Want Sandy
A clever service called I Want Sandy, from the lads that brought us Stikkit, is an entirely email based “secretarial service.” Part of that service sends email reminders for future events that you tell it to remember.

Like a real secretary (at least from what I’ve seen in the movies), cc’ing Sandy with “Sandy, remind me about my haircut appointment on July 6 1-2pm” will result in an email reminder around that time.

More from Sandy’s blog

Google Calendar
Like I Want Sandy, Google Calendar requires a login, but if you already have a Gmail account, you have easy, no sign-up access to Gcal.

Adding an event to the calendar, you have the option of when and how (popup, email or SMS) that message is (re)delivered to you.

Future Me

Future Me does one thing, it sends you a message in the future.

It’s not a reminder service, so you can’t send yourself a message any less than 90 days in the future. If you truly only want to send yourself a time capsule email, this is the service for you.

No login required here, but you do have to verify the email address that you plan to send the message to.

Dear Future Self, …

I’m thinking of using one of these services to remind me of bigger goals in life like wanting to exercise more or learning to kayak, rather than a standard reminder like “clean out your inbox.”

That’s one thing I don’t need a reminder of.

Infernal spam: Blocking e-mails constant struggle - Tulsa World

And apparently, incredibly expensive.

The tools may be effective, but for businesses like Bank of Oklahoma that run their own e-mail servers, they can be expensive. Brian Foster, senior vice president of information security at BOk, said a system to protect the company’s 3,000 to 6,000 unique addresses costs $30,000 to $50,000.

The article goes on to talk about the ever changing face of spam and the efforts at the Bank of Oklahoma to thwart it.

Why is Gmail still in beta
Good question, Esquire Magazine. We were wondering the same thing.

Gmail rolls out PowerPoint preview
Looks like Google might be getting closer to a full office suite. Yesterday, Google unveiled PowerPoint within Gmail. While you can’t create PowerPoint in Gmail, it sure seems like a good place to store them.

Oh, look you’re still getting plenty of spam
Techdirt has a sarcastic (and accurate) article about how putting one spammer in jail really just scratches the surface of the spam epidemic.

And speaking of jailed spammers -

Spam King denied bail
Our man in the can apparently will be staying there.

photo from Flickr user TheAlieness

Guy Kawasaki is my hero.

I’ve been a fan of Guy’s since he was an evangelist at Apple back in the good (and bad) old days.

He had my dream job - go out and tell everyone about products that change the world. Fortunately, I’ve been able to follow in Guy’s footsteps.

Evangelist, Entreprenuer, Author

Guy has had a amazing career. He created the field of corporate evangelism at Apple back in the 1980’s. He has started his own companies. Most recently, Guy Kawasaki spends his days as a venture capitalist, popular blogger and bestselling author.

Reading Guy’s books are like getting an MBA in product marketing (minus about $50k in tuition). From his marketing and strategy doctrine, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, to his manual on creating a startup company, The Art of the Start, to his new product and marketing creation manifesto, Rules for Revolutionaries, Guy is blessed with gift of being able to break through all the BS and boil down the essentials of what you need to do to make your product fly.

Needless to say, Guy Kawasaki’s books and blog postings are extremely helpful when starting a company or building a new product. Given all the help Guy has given us, we’d like to return the favor.

How Guy Kawasaki Could Use Boxbe

Man… so many uses of Boxbe for Guy, I don’t even know where to begin. I could give Guy some of the same advice I gave Lifehacker blogger, Gina Trapani for her blog, but perhaps a more novel approach would be to use Boxbe to filter pitches for his VC firm, Garage Technology Ventures.

Boxbe’s value proposition centers around the age old concept that time is money. Now, Guy Kawasaki is a busy man and it shouldn’t be free to waste his time with unwanted email and pitches for startup companies that are stupid. I bet a lot of these guys don’t even read his rules for pitching a VC.

5 Easy Steps

Guy - here’s what you can do to weed out the people who don’t follow your rules (or are otherwise irritating).

1. Sign up with Boxbe.
2. Set your access price to $99 (our current maximum).
3. Post your new email address on your blog.
4. Wait for pitches (this shouldn’t take long).
5. If the pitches waste your time, collect $99.

You could take one of your other, smarter investments to dinner with the money. Alternatively, you could give the money to charity - or keep it. You pick.

What about everybody else?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a VC or famous blogger to use Boxbe. Anyone who has a problem with spam or unwanted email can use Boxbe and just act like you are.

photo by Dave Sifry on Flickr

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.

As we head into the long weekend (in the US, anyway), here are some last email tips to ponder in traffic going to your favorite vacation spot. Summer is here and you need email efficiency more than ever.

Have a happy and safe Memorial Day from all of us here at Boxbe.

10 ways to get a grip on your e-mail - Fortune Magazine
Authors of the new book The Hamster Revolution: Stop Info-Glut and Reclaim Your Life!, offer up ways to get through email and change the way you look at time spent looking at email.

Is a one word “thanks” email unnecessary? - Lifehacker
Lifehacker readers debate the finer points of whether or not to send a one word email response “thanks” to people who you would thank face to face in real life. Email etiquette is ever changing amorphous beast. Personally, as a someone who works remotely, this is the only way I have to thank most people, so I’m all for it, your mileage may vary.

How to crank through your Gmail - Web Worker Daily
Leo Babauta over at Web Worker Daily gives us some hands on tips and tricks for getting through your email account Gmail-style. Keyboard shortcuts, filter suggestions and more await you on the other side of this link.

Finally, a follow up to a link we gave you last month.

E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’ - Washington Post
Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post reports on Fred Wilson’s email bankruptcy post last month. Fred gave his inbox the heave-ho by blogging an apology to all the unanswered emails in his inbox to start fresh. Memorial Day might just be the time to send out that email to start over with your email.

Iwo Jima image from Flickr user bootbearwdc