Boxbe Blog

Eric Rice and Robert Scoble, a couple of bloggers who would benefit from using Boxbe.

I’ve been blogging for almost two years now and I love to hear from readers. Comments are a great place for people to continue the conversation, but often I’d like to take some conversations offline.

Most people don’t want to post their email address on their blog for fear of spam. If you do post your email address on your blog, that fear is realized.

I’ve seen lots of ways people get around not posting their actual email address like typing out “randy at boxbe dot com” or “randy at the URL you see above.” Worse, you might have a form that people can fill out to reach you, which doesn’t really make readers feel all warm and fuzzy when they want to reach you.

If you want to reach me, here’s a good old fashioned “mailto:” link – randy@boxbe.com.

I can post this email address anywhere I’d like:

• blogs,
• forums,
• comments,
• Twitter,
• or anywhere I’d want someone to be able to reach me later.

Here’s how it works

When people I haven’t pre-approved email me for the first time, they have to prove they are not an automated sender. I don’t think that is too much to ask. If they are a real person, I approve them to send me more emails by clicking “Approve” right in the message. I’m pretty friendly like that.

Use Gmail?

If you use Gmail, we’ve got you covered. With our Gmail integration, we’ve made it even easier to get a clean email inbox. Go here, plug in your Gmail address, click the button and you’re done.

Why use Boxbe?

Bloggers need to talk to their adoring fans and blogging isn’t a one way street. Blogging is about conversation. Many of those conversations can occur within or amongst blogs, but not everyone wants their opinion, question, or letters of love and devotion to be part of the public domain.

You want to put your email in a public place but you don’t want to be buried in spam. Boxbe can help you do that.

Over the past few months, I’ve talked in the blog about Boxbe’s mission, new features, your attention and about the world of email in general. I haven’t talked about who should use Boxbe and why.

What is Boxbe?

To review what we’re all about, Boxbe is a platform to help you regain control of your attention and the center of most people’s attention is their email inbox. From Thede’s opening post describing Boxbe:

Boxbe is (at its heart) a new kind marketplace. What you trade through Boxbe (or give away, the choice is yours), is “access to yourself”. For your work and personal correspondence, you can let access be free. For others, we help you set a price. Our goal is to give you control over your inbox, and through that, your time.

While I receive somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 emails a day (not including spam), I know many other people whose daily email volume reaches into the multiple of hundreds. Of course, not every email needs to be responded to, but most emails need to be read.

If you receive a lot of email, I bet you also receive a lot of unwanted email. Some might call that unwanted email spam. Others might not call it anything all as it is adrift in the barren wasteland that is their unopened, unattended to email inbox.

Boxbe – Who is it good for?

The obvious answer to me is everyone. I haven’t met anyone who says, “You know, I just don’t receive enough email.” But, there are some specific people and groups of people who might benefit more by using Boxbe.

From time to time, I’ll be talking about groups of people or specific individuals that we think would benefit from using Boxbe. Some of those specific groups of people will include bloggers, podcasters, politicians, small business owners, and anyone whose livelihood is utterly dependent on getting important email.

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.

Major Anti-Spam Lawsuit Filed in Virginia – Washington Post
“The company filed the suit on behalf of some 20,000 people who use its anti-spam tool. Web site owners use the project’s free software to generate pages that feature unique “spam trap” e-mail addresses each time those pages are visited. The software then records the Internet address of the visitor and the date and time of the visit. Because those addresses are never used to sign up for e-mail lists, the software can help investigators draw connections between harvesters and spammers if an address generated by a spam trap or “honey pot” later receives junk e-mail.” [via Ars Technica and Slashdot]

Before you declare email bankruptcy – Web Worker Daily
“Did you ever wish you could delete all your email without responding? Maybe you can. It’s called email bankruptcy. You realize you are never going to dig yourself out from under the pile of email in your inbox so you just declare that you won’t. You start afresh.”

Great tips on how to avoid an email overload calamity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve considered doing this.

Classic DM tactics are spam for filters – Direct Marketing News
“More and more well-intended e-mail is ending up in the junk box as companies and individuals tighten the screws on their anti-spam systems.”

Interesting article about the multitude of false positives that are generated by standard email spam filters.

Photo by Flickr member Rosa y Dani

So, we’ve talked about botnets in the recent post, but what exactly is a botnet?

From Wikipedia

While the term “botnet” can be used to refer to any group of bots, such as IRC bots, the word is generally used to refer to a collection of compromised, or Zombie computers running programs, usually referred to as worms, Trojan horses, or backdoors, under a common command and control infrastructure.

How widespread are these botnets? From a recent story from MSNBC, “Internet founding father Vint Cerf dramatically suggested that 150 million computers worldwide may have been hijacked by criminals.

Essentially, botnets are the root of all sorts of computer nastiness, but first and foremost, they seem to be the source of a very large portion of spam on the internet today.

To protect yourself (and others) from botnets, take a look at my post last week, 5 ways to protect your computer from botnets, spyware and other malware.

Here are some resources for learning more about botnets:

• Tracking Botnets
• Is the botnet battle already lost?
• Is your computer a criminal?

Photo from Wikipedia

Technorati tags: botnet, spam

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]

So, besides using Boxbe to screen your email, here are the top five ways to protect your PC from botnets, spyware, and other malware.

1. Buy a Mac

Seriously. Last year, Symantec’s official blog caused waves by saying “Simply put, at the time of writing this article, there are no file-infecting viruses that can infect Mac OS X.”

This isn’t to say their couldn’t be malware for the Mac, it’s just that their isn’t any currently. Compared to the millions of viruses for Windows, that sounds pretty good to me. For many users this isn’t possible or desireable, so keep reading for things that you can do to secure your Windows installation.

2. Upgrade to Vista

One of the claimed benefits of upgrading to Windows Vista is increased security. Symantec has backed Microsoft up with a white paper [PDF] (and a site section) that has a detailed Vista security audit and their assessment that there have been no known Vista viruses to date.

3. Install security updates

One of the interesting things about bots, spyware and other software designed to exploit your computer, is that most people become infected after a fix has been released from Microsoft. Why? Well, let’s just say that creators of malware aren’t all super geniuses.

When an exploit is revealed, there is a gap in between when a fix is released and when users actually download and install the fix. That opening gives hackers an opportunity to create a program that exploits the very problem that was just patched.

Generally, I’d advise people to wait when it comes to installing recently updated software as sometimes the fix can be worse the original problem. However security updates should be installed right away.

4. Install and use anti-virus and anti-spyware applications

Most anti-virus and anti-spyware software can be scheduled to run at specific times of day. If you eat lunch at the same time every day, consider scheduling the software to run then. It could also serve as a helpful reminder to actually eat lunch.

And don’t forget to keep your virus and spyware definitions up to date. Having outdated definitions is kind of like not having protection at all.

5. Don’t open email attachments from untrusted senders

And frankly, sometimes even from trusted senders if they aren’t technically savvy. I can’t believe that this still needs to be mentioned but these attachments aren’t opening themselves.

Bonus: Turn off your PC at night

PCs these days have a number of power saving modes that make it acceptable to leave your computer on all the time. I had gotten in the habit of leaving my home computers on all the time to guarantee instant access whenever I needed them.

If your computer has been compromised by a spam bot, leaving your computer on 24/7 gives these bots more of an opportunity to send their illicit messages. While it won’t get rid of the spam bot, it certainly will cut back on the messages sent.

Finally

Short of turning off network connectivity to your PC, many security experts believe that malware is becoming more widespread and common, everyday computers have so much power that it is far more likely for a botnet to go undetected than ever before. The internet is still a wild wholly frontier, keep yourself safe out there.

photo from Flickr user brookenovak

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.

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…)

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

Happy 10th birthday Yahoo! Mail and thanks for the presents. Yesterday, Yahoo! Mail announced that starting in May, it will be rolling out email accounts with unlimited storage to all users.

To put “unlimited” email into perspective, when Yahoo! Mail (initially RocketMail) started, they gave users 2 megabytes of email. Before yesterday’s announcement, they offered premium subscribers 2 gigabytes of email, a thousand fold increase. Unlimited storage, well, is a lot bigger :-).

While we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about our friends over at Google, unlimited storage definitely trumps Gmail’s 2 gigs. This is no small feature from our friends at Yahoo!

Congrats Yahoo! Mail (and happy birthday)!

Read [via TechCrunch]

Continuing on off of our announcement earlier this week, we’re busy making Gmail our email nerve center. Gmail recently released the ability to download your POP email into Gmail. If you like Gmail like we do, this is a great way to make Gmail your email communications HQ.

Before you get started, you should have your outside account information handy to add into Gmail.

Here’s how you set it up:

Click on Settings in the upper right corner of Gmail.

Click on the Accounts tab

Within the Accounts tab, click Add another email address.

Enter your non-Gmail address:

Now, if you are using another major email provider, like Yahoo!, Gmail will auto-fill some of the options for you.

Otherwise, enter in the relevant data. You should be able to get this from your email provider’s website.

Applying a label as new messages come in is a good way to keep track of messages from different accounts.

To finish, click Add Account.

Gmail allows you to add up to 5 email accounts so, if you have several accounts, Gmail might be a good way to consolidate email into one central location.

One of the many strengths of Google’s Gmail service is the ability to access most functions without touching the mouse. Now, I’m a WIMP interface kind of guy, whereas company CEO Thede might be using the Unix mail application. Fortunately, Gmail has us both covered.

Navigating

/ = Search
k = Move to a newer conversation
j = Move to an older conversation
o or Enter – Opens message
x – selects message for another action (starring, printing, etc)
s – Stars a message
Tab – Navigates down relevant fields
Shift Tab – Navigates up relevant fields

Reading

u – Returns to the message list
m – Mutes messages – Archives conversations and auto-archives all messages in the same conversation.
y – Archives messages
! – Report spam
y then o – Archives the message then goes to the next one.

Writing

c = Compose new message
r = Reply to message
a = Reply to all
f = Forward a message
Tab then Enter – Sends composed message
Control + s – Saves a draft

Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts
One page print view [PDF]

[Editor's Note: While this method of filtering still works for integrating Boxbe and Gmail together, we've improved the process. Take a look at this post for further instructions.]
Updated: Friday, May 11, 2007

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned that Boxbe is here to enhance your email, not replace it.

Boxbe can optimize your Gmail account to receive the messages you truly want to receive.

Assuming you have already added your Gmail ‘contacts’ and verified your Gmail account, here’s how to use Boxbe to screen email arriving in your Gmail account.

(more…)

Here are a few productivity tips from the web to help you be more productive this week.

Speed up Mail.app (Mac OS X)
Hawk Wings describes a quick trick to slim down Mail.app’s SQLite database and getting a snappier email client as a result.

Send Gmail to your cell phone
Ben Murphy describes a great way to send email selectively to any cell phone (hopefully, your own). Not quite a Blackberry, but great for getting important messages on the go. [via Lifehacker]

Turn Gmail into your personal nerve center
Does anyone just use it for email anymore? Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion documents 5 ways to make Gmail the center of your productivity universe including:

1. How to turn Gmail into a massive personal database
2. How to get real-time news updates in Gmail (Gmail+ Google Talk + Twitter)
3. How to automatically store your bookmarks in Gmail (Gmail + del.icio.us + Yahoo Alerts)
4. How to manage Calendar and To-Dos in Gmail (Gmail + Backpack + GCal + GTalk + iMified)
5. How to blog from Gmail (Gmail + Wordpress/TypePad/Blogger + IMified)

Hope you had a great weekend. Now, get back to work! :-)

Do we dislike email marketers? This is a question that I’ve received numerous times. Actually, we started this service to help email marketers as much as helping consumers.

Marco Lopez is a good friend of mine. He makes an honest living as an email marketer. He’s worked at a lot of great companies including eBay, Expedia and most recently Farecast, a great new travel site.

His job is to figure out the best kind of email to send his customers. All of the people on his list have said that it was ok to send them email. People like email from Marco. He tells them about deals in places they frequently travel. He tells them that prices are going to go up soon. He tells them it might be a good idea to wait a couple of days before buying a ticket.

What he doesn’t want to do is irritate you. He doesn’t want to send you emails that you don’t want. But his business is tricky because he only knows certain things about you. And unfortunately, he isn’t psychic.

Ultimately, if Marco sends you an email that you want to read and you buy something, everybody wins. If Marco sends you an email that you don’t want to read, and it’s irritating, everybody loses.

Email marketers are doing their best to send you the stuff you want and better yet, the stuff you’re going to buy anyway. He wants you as a customer. I want to be his customer. And that’s part of why we’re here. To help Marco help you (and me).

[NOTE: The Direct Marketing Association has put together a nice set of guidelines and best practices for direct and email marketers. Most legitimate marketers follow these rules.]

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

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

What is the cost of your attention?

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

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

5 minutes x 5 days x 50 weeks = 21 hours

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

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

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

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

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

photo by Flickr member cmiper

Mike Gunderloy, over at Web Worker Daily, has some great tips for organizing your email. From figuring out your organizational style, cool tools to use, to setting up rules, this article will help you take email organization to the next level.

Read

As you might imagine, we think about email a lot here at Boxbe. Email consumes a lot of everyone’s time, so there are always ways to get more efficient at getting through it. We’ll be sharing our favorite email tips on the blog from time to time. This first set is from the top notch productivity blog, Lifehacker.

• Backing up Gmail with Thunderbird
  
• How to set up a smart Out-of-Office auto-reply with Gmail
• 8 killer Thunderbird plug-ins
• Outlook Tip: Send an email without touching the mouse
• Mailredirect – Thunderbird plugin

Now, if you’re reading this, chances are that you wanted a Gmail account, you already have one. But just in case your grandparents, children or your cat doesn’t have an address at Gmail yet, Google finally dropped the invite-only system and opened Gmail to anyone interested.

With its 2.8 gigabytes of space, full keyboard interface, and POP access, we’re big fans of Google’s free Gmail service. Google opening up the service to the world is a monumental occasion for the Mountain View company.

Googlers were none to shy to let us know how they feel about the launch. “We have already made e-mail better for everyone in the world,” Google’s Coleman boasted.”

I can’t say I disagree.

Gmail

Read
[via Lifehacker]