Boxbe Blog

We are still experiencing a service outage for a number of our members and are still working with Yahoo! Mail to fix the problem.

We have fixed a problem for users whose accounts are being enabled (and subsequently disabled again) receiving multiple notifications regarding the service going up and down.

If you have received numerous messages regarding the status of your account, you shouldn’t receive any more until we’ve resolved this issue.

Sorry for the delay in reactivating Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail, but rest assured we are tirelessly working on getting service working again.

Today, we’re announcing that our Boxbe for Outlook add-in is available to everyone for download. While it still has some rough edges, unlike a lot of other betas, we’ve been testing this add-in both internally and with a sizable number of beta testers for several months.

What is Boxbe for Outlook?

We’ve encapsulated all the functionality of the Boxbe website into an easy to use plugin for use with Microsoft Outlook.

Following is a little introduction to our latest product, Boxbe for Outlook.

Automatic Guest List Creation

The Boxbe for Outlook plugin looks through your list of contacts, past emails and email messages that you have sent to others, to create your Guest List quickly and get you started using Boxbe.

Once you have created your Guest List, email from people on your Guest List will go directly to your Inbox as they have before, while email from people that are not on your Guest List will go to your boxbe Waiting List folder.

Waiting List and Junk Ratings

If someone emails you that is not on your Guest List, that message is sent to your Waiting List folder and Boxbe determines how likely that message is to be spam.

Messages are rated on a scale from 1 to 10 on their likelihood that they are spam. Messages that score low are less likely to be spam and messages that score high are more likely to be spam.

Boxbe Junk Ratings quickly separate the good from the bad.

Fast Setup, Easy to Use

Depending on the size of your list of contacts and mailboxes, setup usually takes a couple of minutes. Once you are set up, adding new senders to your Guest List is a snap. We add a toolbar to Outlook that gives you quick access to the tools you’ll use after setup.

Approve Senders
Clicking “Add Sender” will add the sender of the email that you are currently reading to your Guest List. Adding to your Guest List ensures that that person can easily email you again.

Approve Domains
If you get a lot of email from a particular domain (example: your company or an organization that you belong to), you can quickly add the domain to your Guest List as well.

Protect multiple email addresses

One of the best things about Boxbe for Outlook is that you can protect any or all of the email addresses that you access via Microsoft Outlook. The Guest List that you create for one email address will work across all the email accounts that you choose for Boxbe to protect.

Get Boxbe for Outlook

You can get Boxbe for Outlook by signing up for Boxbe or adding an email address to your existing Boxbe account here.

System requirements:
Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007
Windows Vista or Windows XP

We hope you like the new plugin but if you have any difficulty using Boxbe for Outlook or have any questions, email us support@boxbe.com.

Last night we had a service outage for our Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail service. After diagnosing the problem with the good folks down at Yahoo!, we have fixed the issues that caused the outage.

Essentially, due to a rapid increase in Boxbe users, Boxbe was shut out of using Yahoo! Mail’s API. Fortunately, we devised a way to make our service work better with Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail re-enabled Boxbe to access your account early this afternoon and the service should be up and running right now.

Thanks to our friends down at Yahoo! that helped us get Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail up and running again.

It will take us some time to catch up with all the email in your account, but we anticipate that everything will be running smoothly and back to normal in the next day or so.

We’re really sorry for the interruption in Boxbe service and hope that you didn’t receive too much unwanted mail in the mean time.

The silver lining to the service outage is that it gave us an opportunity adopt new practices to scale Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail to make our service available to even more users.

A big thank you to our friends over at Yahoo! Developer Network for making Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail an Editor’s Pick in the Yahoo! Gallery today.

Yahoo! Gallery, in case you didn’t know, is the site that Yahoo! uses to show off sites and services that use Yahoo! technologies. As you all know, Boxbe integrates tightly with Yahoo! Mail, making it so you don’t have to leave Yahoo! Mail to use the Boxbe service.

You may not know that we use the awesome Yahoo! Mail API to power Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail. Without the API, Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail wouldn’t be so nicely integrated with Yahoo! Mail.

What’s an API?

Sometimes living in the world of developers, we forget that most normal folks don’t know what an API is. Wikipedia’s definition is

“An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.”

Ok, that probably didn’t help much…

Essentially, an API is the way we access your Yahoo! Mail account with Yahoo!’s (and your) blessing. We use tools Yahoo! has built for people outside the company to enhance their existing services.

The folks at Yahoo! know that they can’t be all things to all people so they let companies like ours further individualize their services.

Yahoo! Gallery Pick

We’re happy that our Yahoo! Mail product has been made a pick on the Yahoo! Gallery.

Thanks again, Yahoo!

We launched Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail back in the fall. Here is a quick overview of how it works.

Boxbe Waiting List

No need to come to the Boxbe Web site to view messages on your Waiting List. 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.

Sort messages easily

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.

This makes it easier to find messages from senders that you might want to add to your Guest List. Additionally, you can easily search messages in the Waiting List using Yahoo! Mail’s search tool.

Approve Guests within Yahoo! Mail

If you decide a message isn’t junk, clicking the “Approve” link from within the message in the Waiting List adds the sender to your Guest List and moves the message into your Yahoo! Mail inbox.

Automatically add new guests

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.

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail is easy to set up and it’s absolutely free.

(Not a Yahoo! Mail user? Boxbe works with Gmail and a plugin for Microsoft Outlook is currently in beta testing.)

Need help getting up to speed on Gmail? This video from Ask the PC Guide can help.

The video covers creating labels, filters, shortcuts, managing multiple email accounts and more.

Remember, you can use Boxbe for your Gmail account by signing up here.

[Video via Lifehacker]

Feature: Getting Things Done with labels and filters in Gmail 2.0 - Geek.com
Joel Evans over at Geek.com details how to use the new features of Gmail to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) system with Gmail.

New URL features can make your e-mail productive again - Ars Technica
New linking feature in Mac OS X Mail and in Gmail documented by Ars Technica and John Gruber.

Easily Transfer Emails from Hotmail to Gmail Via Outlook Connector - Digital Inspiration Technology Guide
How to move your Hotmail email to Gmail via Outlook.

Gmail Tip: Import Messages into Gmail via IMAP - Dracoware
"Here’s a quick overview of how to get all of your old emails into Gmail as painlessly as possible (and one way that preserves dates!)."

image by Flickr user zenera

NOTE: Boxbe is discontinuing support for removing Boxbe for Gmail in this way. Please follow the directions at the bottom of this post to remove Boxbe for Gmail.

Edited February 4, 2008

Recently, we’ve had a little bug that made it difficult to remove Boxbe protection from Gmail accounts. The bug has been fixed, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell everyone how to disable Boxbe for your email account (particularly Gmail). We know some people may want to discontinue service after trying it and we’ve made it easy to enable and disable accounts.

How it works

We’ve added a filter to Gmail to selectively forward email to Boxbe and send email from senders on your Guest List back to Gmail. You can turn this on and off on the site by going to the Boxbe Dashboard and click “Disable” next to the email address you want to disable (this works with the other addresses, too).

Next, you’ll be taken to a screen that you’ll have to enter in your Gmail password.

If for some reason, that doesn’t work, click through to the next page to get the details on how to turn Boxbe for Gmail off in Gmail.

To turn off Boxbe for Gmail manually, follow these steps.

First, go to your settings from within Gmail.

Second, once inside your Gmail Settings, click “Filters.”

Finally, find the Boxbe filter (this will be the one that says “Do this: Forward to username@boxbe.com, Skip Inbox, Delete it”

Once you’ve removed the filter, Boxbe won’t be protecting your Gmail account anymore.

You can always re-enable the account on your Boxbe Dashboard.

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.

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 scour the web every day for email related news, how-to’s and other items of interest. Most of those end up in our link feed over to the right.

Here are some of the latest cool tools I’ve found on the web.

Better Gmail 2
Our friends over at Lifehacker have updated their Better Gmail Firefox plugin to work with the new Gmail interface. We don’t have the new interface yet, so can’t say too much about it. If you do, download the plugin and let us know.

ClearContext, helping with your email overload
New plugin for Outlook "that helps with project management: sorting and categorizing emails relating to a particular subject".

Six Top Ways to Tame Your E-Mail
Web Worker Daily gives us their top 6 email add ons for increasing email productivity.

Batch Add Email Addresses with AddressContext
"The addressContext Thunderbird extension batch processes to and from email addresses for a set of messages from the context menu."

News is coming in from all over the web about Google’s Gmail launching IMAP support for their email service.

What’s IMAP?

Gmail is the first major email service to support the IMAP protocol which is a good way to keep track of email in multiple ways. Every email that you send, receive or move into a different folder all remain on a server. This means you can use Outlook on your PC at work, OS X mail at home and Gmail on your mobile phone and all applications would stay in sync.

Boxbe for Gmail

We expect the Boxbe for Gmail service will continue to work as it currently does, even if you enable IMAP for Gmail. If you experience any service problems, please let us know.

Read

It’s been a while since we’ve posted any news about other places here on the blog, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been watching. Here’s the latest and greatest from the world of email.

Happy 10th Birthday, Yahoo! Mail
We’ve had a great time working with the team down in Sunnyvale on the new Yahoo! Mail application and wish them the best on this momentous occasion. Congrats!

Yahoo Mail to block fake eBay and PayPal e-mail - CNET News.com
Good news for eBay and Paypal users, Yahoo! will be blocking spoofed emails from senders claiming to be Paypal and eBay. We have to applaud Yahoo! for taking steps to curb these phishing emails.

Mac e-mail showdown: Which program delivers? - Computerworld
Looking to switch email apps on the Mac? Or maybe coming from the PC world and wanted to know what your Mac options are? Computerworld takes a look at Mail.app, Thunderbird and Microsoft Entourage desktop mail applications for OSX.

Techies take on spam zombies -San Francisco Chronicle
“Computer scientists in Menlo Park are releasing a free diagnostic program today to help network administrators find PCs infected with an insidious new type of virus that has already tainted millions of computers.” Strangely, SFGate doesn’t link directly to the software page, but if you want to check it out, go to the BotHunter Free Internet Distribution Page.

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.

Boxbe Waiting List

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.

Sort messages easily

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.

Approve Guests within Yahoo! Mail

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.

Automatically add new guests

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.

Launching ’soon’

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.

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.

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

The Mozilla foundation has picked up development of Eudora and released a beta of their Thunderbird powered update to the venerable email client.

Brief History

If you’re an old time internet guy like myself, you might remember a little email application called Eudora. Eudora was one of the first email applications on a non-Unix system. Eudora started off as a free program, but eventually, became a for pay email client.

Around the turn of the century, Eudora kind of got lost in the world where email applications became free or were included with some more powerful package. In the Windows world, Eudora lost ground to “free” email apps. You had the choice of Microsoft Outlook, which you got “free” when you bought Microsoft Office, or Thunderbird, which you could download for free from Mozilla.

Eudora Reborn

Several months ago having effectively stopped developing Eudora all together, Qualcomm released the source code of Eudora for anyone who wanted to continue development. The Mozilla foundation took the Eudora interface and grafted it onto the Thunderbird mail client.

Eudora has had a storied history, but was one of the first and best email applications around. I’m glad Qualcomm made Eudora open source and Mozilla has picked up development efforts for the application. I haven’t looked at it in years, so maybe I’ll find something that I like.

Download the beta (via Ars Technica and Daring Fireball)

More discussion on Eudora at TechMeme

After a year in beta, Yahoo! Mail has been “officially” released. Congratulations to our friends down in Sunnyvale on this momentus release. Naturally, leaving beta means adding even more features.

Here’s the skinny:

Search Improvements

Being able to refine my searches within email is something I miss when using web based email over Outlook or Apple’s Mail program. Yahoo! has answered this with a series of great refinement options.

Currently, you can refine searches by (pictured):

• Sender
• Folder
• Date
• Attachment Type
• Message Status

Yahoo! Messenger

Following Gmail’s lead, Yahoo! has incorporated Yahoo! Messenger into the Yahoo! Mail interface. AIMing to be your communications dashboard, moving IM into Yahoo! Mail is a great help for people like me who communicate via IM all day.

For an added dose of interoperability, if you have friends that use MSN Messenger, you can add them to friends list in Yahoo! Messenger as well. (I’m now just one step closer to not using Adium and Trillian).

Text Messaging

Finally, for you crazy kids out there with your texting and your LOL ZOMG, Yahoo! is helping you keep track of your posse via SMS.

You can now send and receive txt messages directly from the Yahoo! Mail interface and view the conversations inline

Now, I know there are other places you can send SMS on the web for free, but as part of my centralized communications arsenal that is Yahoo! Mail, I don’t have to go looking very far.

No word on whether Yahoo! is paying my texting bill :-)

More on Yahoo!’s Blog

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m spending a lot of quality time working in Yahoo! Mail these days. While I’ve always used Yahoo! Mail as a primary account, I’ve generally used POP to retrieve email via OS X’s Mail application.

Much like Gmail, almost every command in Yahoo! Mail is accessible via keyboard shortcut. While these commands are readily available on Yahoo! Mail’s help site, I’ve created a one page printable version for your desktop convenience.

Print it

I’ve embedded a printable document with Scrib’d document embed application. You can view and print the document just by clicking below.