Boxbe Blog

We’ve got a bunch of new features in the pipeline, but I almost forgot to mention some refinements we’ve made to the site recently.

Email Addresses page

We’ve made it a lot easier to update email addresses that you are using with Boxbe. By going to your Email Addresses page, you can maintain, enable, disable or add new email addresses to be protected by Boxbe.

To protect a new email address, you can either add it at the top of the Email Addresses page

or from your Dashboard page.

Once you type the email address in, you’ll be guided through the process to protect that email address using Boxbe.

We hope this makes it easier to add email addresses to your Boxbe account. If you have any problems or difficulties with this or any other feature, send email to support@boxbe.com.

We’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.

Here’s a little tidbit I discovered recently while using Apple’s Mail.app.

One of the pain points for me for using Boxbe is keeping my list of contacts up to date. As an Apple Mail user, there is an easy way to do this. After you update your contacts, you can easily export them to Boxbe.

“Previous Recipients”

While it’s not exactly in the most obvious place, select Window > Previous Recipients.

This is a list of all the people you have ever sent email to in Mail.app. Sort the far left column to get a list of all the people who are not already in your Address Book.

Select the people you would like to add to your Address Book and click “Add to Address Book.” That’s it.

To import these addresses into Boxbe, select all of your addresses and click File > Export vCard. Despite sounding like you’ll only be saving one vCard, this will export all the Address Book entries you’ve selected into one file. You can import this file into Boxbe on your Add Senders page.

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

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.

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

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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

Public Forwarding Address

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

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

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

Email on Steroids

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

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

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

Who should use the forwarding email address?

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

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