Boxbe Blog

Ok, enough with the teasing, on with the announcing…

We’re pleased to announce a (limited) beta of our newest product which will integrate Boxbe’s service into Yahoo! Mail.

Our Yahoo! Mail integration will work similarly to our Gmail in that all of your email will still come to your Yahoo! Mail account.

Additionally, we will be offering access to your quarantined messages from within Yahoo! Mail and we’ll scan the list of people that you regularly email to ensure that their emails continue to come through to your inbox.

The beta will work with both the new beta Yahoo! Mail as well as the older interface.

Limited beta

While we are very excited about this new integration, we haven’t released this full-fledged product yet. We are offering a limited beta to those interested in helping us test the product. We’ll be rolling it out slowly, so don’t get discouraged if you’re not first on the list.

Email us to be selected for the beta.

Like being too rich or too thin, in the world of email, you can never have “enough” storage. Or so our pals at Google and Hotmail are telling us.

Coming on the heels of Yahoo’s unlimited storage announcement, these announcements seem sort of silly. However, no one really seems to know what “unlimited” really means. I’m sure that users of Hotmail and Gmail will be happy with these upgrades.

Google Storage

Google is now offering paid upgrades for both Gmail and Picasa.

• 6 GB for $20 a year
• 25 GB for $75.00 a year
• 100 GB for $250 a year
• 250 GB for $500 a year

While on the pricey side, if you are a user of these services (especially Picasa) having storage like this is certainly worthwhile.

While I’m an avid Flickr user, having a backed up version of my photos online is invaluable.

Read

Hotmail Upgrades

Hotmail has joined the free upgrade party by offering 5 GB of storage for free on their service, bringing them into the number two spot for overall free storage space.

Hotmail has been evolving as it is rolled into the Microsoft’s Windows Live initiative. With lots of new features (which we’ve talked about in the past) and new storage capacity, Hotmail is looking better and better.

Read

Friend of emailers everywhere, Merlin Mann has been an organizational hero of mine. Inbox Zero” is a concept Merlin pioneered (with a little help from GTD) and it is “an action based” strategy keeps your inbox free of all emails and creates a methodology for keeping your email centric life sane.

Sound good? Maybe a little scary? You can read more about Merlin’s system over on his blog, 43 Folders.

Embedded below is a talk Merlin did recently at Google talking about Inbox Zero. The video is about an hour, but is chock full of great advice. And, the title of this post will become more clear when you watch the video.

Ok, I admit it. We love the Google around Boxbe HQ. Here’s our latest collection of Gmail tips from around the web. Sit back, relax and let the knowledge flow in.

Hack Attack: Back up your Google Apps data – Lifehacker
The power outage that took out a lot of our favorite sites on Tuesday (Craigslist, Netflix, Vox, LiveJournal and others), serves as a little reminder to all of us that putting all of our data in the cloud doesn’t preclude you from backing up those files. While Google wasn’t one of the sites that went down, there are a number of reasons to have backups of your most important work.

How do I create a mail merge in Gmail? – Ask MetaFilter
The Ask Metafilter gang pile on the answers to mailing a lot of people in Gmail.

Hack Attack: Become a Gmail master – Lifehacker
Lifehacker writer Adam Pash has put together a nice hefty post (with video) to take you from n00b to l33t Gmail user. He covers labels, filters, keyboard shortcuts and a lot more.

Top Ten Gmail Tweaks – Trendplex
Steven Price over on Trendplex goes crazy with Greasemonkey and Firefox. The post details out his favorite tweaks to Gmail including macros, colors, Gcal and more.

We’re big fans of the Firefox Better Gmail plugin Gina and the gang at Lifehacker have been working on. The Better Gmail plugin cleans up Gmail’s interface, adds functionality and makes Gmail more adaptable to your individual needs.

The “official” 1.0 release dropped today and adds the following new features:

• Nested folders
• Tools menu direct access
• Google Apps compatibility

I’m particularly stoked as a Google Apps user to get functionality spread to my domain as well.

Congrats, Lifehacker, on your 1.0 release.

Read more

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

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

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.

It’s no secret that we love the Lifehacker blog (and lifehacking in general) here at Boxbe. We love all the efficiency it brings our lives and the general philosophy that things can always be better. Gmail tips, getting rid of junk snail mail, unix hacking, plugins to improve our experience on popular web sites, what’s not to love?

Who is Gina Trapani?

Well, the blog doesn’t just write and edit itself, folks. And we think that Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding Editor and efficiency wünderkind, is the bee’s knees. Being Editor of Lifehacker, one of the most popular blogs on the internet, Gina doesn’t just sit around waiting for her blogger minions to write up posts so she can nitpick vocabulary and spelling, Gina normally writes about 6 posts a day and two weekly features. Many of those posts are tips emailed in from readers.

Besides being a brave soul who actually has an email address on her personal blog, Lifehacker has a public email address on every single page to their tips hotline.

I can only imagine how much spam and unwanted email she must receive. Given all the help Gina has given us, we’d like the opportunity to return the favor.

How to use Boxbe

One way Gina could use Boxbe would be to make all of the people submitting their tips to Lifehacker prove that they are human with our simple captcha test. Better yet, to prevent marketers from over running her inbox with pitches, she could simply set her contact price to $.10. That way, she could quickly weed out everyone who wasn’t serious about getting her attention by collecting a dime from every submitter who was marketing to her. She’s not going to get rich off of this, but it does raise the bar to reach Gina.

Her posts show that Gina Trapani is a power user of Google’s Gmail. Arguably, she might know Gmail better than anyone. She’s even created a plugin to make it better. We’ve added our own improvements to Gmail by integrating Boxbe into the service. The process is free and easy and can dramatically improve the quality of email that you receive in Gmail.

Boxbe does this by reducing your inbox to only the email that you want to read and leaving the rest in our quarantine. In practice, we accomplish this by allowing emails from people who are pre-approved in your white list, that take a test to prove they are human or pay a fee.

But Gmail has a spam filter…

Despite Gmail’s wonderful spam filter, unwanted emails and spam do slip through. We’re firm believers that filter based solutions to stop spam simply won’t work in the long run. Ultimately, the war on spam is an arms race and the good guys are losing. Market based solutions like ours are really the only long term solution getting rid of unwanted email and spam.

While you might not be a famous blogger, I bet you do have a problem with spam. Just like Gina and the crew at Lifehacker, we’re here to help.

photo from Flickr user rcrowley

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

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.

Yahoo Mail unlimited rolling out
As mentioned back in March, Yahoo! Mail has started rolling out its unlimited storage this week. Our friends at Mashable are encouraging us to test what “unlimited” means.

Google Gmail: Hot, hip or 3rd place?
Donna Bogatin over at ZDNet talks about Gmail and it’s users. Recent studies have shown Gmail to be the third most popular email service, but it is used by the young and wealthy.

Pros and cons of web-based mail
J D Biersdorfer of the New York Times debates the finer points of using email on the web versus a desktop client. We love email of all kinds here at Boxbe.

Image spam by the numbers
Informative article (although formatted in a bewildering way) about the methods used by image spammers. [via Slashdot]

Completely unrelated image by Flickr user eva101.

Shortcuts for Special Gmail Labels
Over at the Google Operating System blog, Ionut Alex Chitu details how to use Gmail’s labeling system’s undocumented shortcuts. “In Gmail every built-in view (e.g.: inbox, trash, read mail) is actually a label. So if you want to view all the unread messages from the inbox, you could search for: label:inbox label:unread.” [via Lifehacker]

Rich HTML email signatures straight from Gmail
Derek Punsalan shows how to get rich text into Gmail signatures. While it does require Firefox and the Better Gmail extension, we know you’re already using those anyway.

Add Outlook to your Google homepage
Our friends at Lifehacker show off how to get your Outlook mail to show up on your iGoogle personalized home page. This gadget does require you to use Windows XP and IE (or a slightly hacked version of Firefox). Very cool indeed.

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

Congrats to the Hotmail team at Microsoft for deploying the new version of the Hotmail service to users and removing that beta tag. Following are links to the details of the launch.

Windows Live Hotmail launches
After a year long beta, Windows Live Hotmail launched yesterday with a whole bunch of new features including 2 gigabytes of storage, Outlook-like design, auto-completion and more.

Rebuilding Hotmail from scratch
A fascinating look at the rebuilding of the Hotmail service.

Windows Live Hotmail vs Gmail
Pete Cashmore over at Mashable compares the new Windows Live Hotmail to Gmail. Is it time to switch? I won’t ruin it for you as we are platform agnostic here at Boxbe.

Other links: Webware, Techcrunch, eWeek.

Undelivered e-mail an offshoot of spam-prevention
John Agsalud of the Honolulu Star Bulletin reports on the increase in false positives in spam filtering systems (FYI, a false positive is a message incorrectly identified as spam).

This battle of good versus evil has been going on for years. Unfortunately, the bad guys have improved their stock so much that the good guys are starting to have a difficult time fighting back. The end result? The good guys’ software is becoming more error-prone and mis-identifying messages as spam when they really are not.

Wow, that was fast.

I mentioned last week that Thunderbird 2.0 RC1 was released. Yesterday, the Mozilla foundation released Thunderbird 2.0.

From Wired.com:

Thunderbird 2.0 is a major leap forward for the Mozilla email client and boasts much improved performance as well as some great new features like support for message tagging, a customizable folder pane and one click integration with popular webmail services like GMail and .Mac.

Fire up your browser and go download it!

Release info [via Lifehacker]

Better Gmail Firefox plugin
Gina Trapani, blogger and Lifehacker supreme has a released a plugin for Gmail that pulls together several Greasemonkey scripts that improve Gmail’s overall usability.

Features include “adding saved searches, attachment icons, label colors, keyboard macros, a filter assistant and right-click conversation previews.”

Massive spam shot of ‘Storm Trojan’ reaches record proportions
According to a recent article in Computerworld, the Storm Trojan virus attack is sending 50 to 60 times the normal volume of spam. The trojan contains a rootkit to cloak itself and it adds the computer to it’s botnet army to perpetuate the trojan horse. Scary stuff. [via PC Doctor and Slashdot]

Gmail vs. Yahoo! Mail Prize Fight [video]
CNET decides which email service is better. We won’t disagree with the results.

Over the weekend, our friends over at Mozilla, shipped the release candidate (RC1) of the their Thunderbird 2.0 mail client..

Thunderbird’s update promises a slew of new features for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems designed around usability, better integration with online email applications and to “address information overload for users.”

New features include:

• Tagging
• Search as you type
• Gmail & .Mac integration
• Better filing tools
• Better support for extensions

If you love online email, why might you use Thunderbird instead?

Scott Gilbertson from Wired asked Scott MacGregor, Thunderbird’s lead engineer that very question today -

We believe the Thunderbird experience is better for moderate to heavy e-mail use. It’s much easier to process incoming mail — anyone who’s had to use web mail on vacation to deal with dozens of e-mails can testify to how tedious it can be.

Read more here.

Richard McManus, over at Read/Write Web has a fantastic overview as well.

Now, if they would just get Mac OS X Address Book integration, I’d be converted.

Download

I’ve been using Gmail a lot more lately testing our integration with Gmail and figuring out if I could live without Apple’s Mail.app. There are a number of good reasons for ditching a desktop application for Gmail – mobile email, one online location for all my email, and a great interface to name a few.

Some folks live and die by their inbox and not knowing if that ever important email from the boss or a new client is waiting for you is a deal killer for most web mail. Sure, hitting refresh is easy, but it’s not quite like using Outlook. For me, as handy as getting Gmail on my mobile would be in a pinch, ultimately, I’m reading and responding to email at my desk.

Enter Google Notifier

Google Notifier is an app that sits in your system tray in Windows or in the menu bar on a Mac that alerts you of new mail in your inbox, upcoming calendar events and even lets you add events quickly to your Google Calendar.

Google Notifier can change all “mailto:” links (links to email addresses) in web pages to use Gmail as its default email application and making it easier to use Gmail as your main email application day to day.

The latest version for Mac OS X, adds a contextual menu to add events for Google Calendar direct from any application and a method for setting Gmail to alert you only when certain messages arrive. Cool tool, indeed.

Google Notifier is still in beta (naturally), but like most of Google’s apps, this beta seems to be fairly rock solid.

Download Google Notifier