Boxbe Blog

Boxbe is keeping up with the latest in security practices and is excited to announce our support of OAUTH with Gmail and Google Apps. This means that when using Boxbe to help prioritize your email, you can exchange email account authentication information with Boxbe (such as your email contact list) without sharing any access permissions (your password).

What has changed with Boxbe, you ask?

First-time users, and users setting up more than one Gmail and/or Google Apps email address in their Boxbe account, previously needed to input their username and password in the Boxbe system. Now, when going through either of the same processes, you will automatically be directed to Gmail to enter your information, and then sent back to Boxbe after accepting to grant OAUTH access to Boxbe.

What are the Benefits?

Your email’s personal access information is not given out.  At all.  Boxbe can only access your data when you have given your consent.

More details: Click on this link for more information on OAUTH from Google.

Boxbe continuously aims to support the best practices, especially when it comes to the security of our members.  We take the privacy of our members seriously, while recognizing that doing so is critical to the success of using the Boxbe service.  As with OAUTH, Boxbe continues to make significant efforts to protect the identity and personal information of our members.  Securely maintaining Access Permissions using industry standard security practices, and seeking the best ways to improve integration with ISP’s (internet service providers) for the sake of security, is our goal.

Note for Gmail OAUTH users: You can always edit any third party applications you have allowed to access your Google account, by visiting your Google account Dashboard.  Under “Account” click on “Websites authorized to access account” and you will be taken to a page with a list of connected sites, apps, and services.

For more information on Boxbe, Click here to see how Boxbe works!

And coming in the not-so-distant future: Boxbe OAUTH support for AOL and
Yahoo! Stay tuned…

To our valued Boxbe for Gmail members,

As proponents of good online security practices, Boxbe is happy to announce basic support of Google’s Advanced Sign-In (click here for Google’s announcement).   If you are not familiar with Google’s multi-factor (2-step) authentication and support for per-application passwords, you can read more about it here.

Or watch the video below.

Using Advanced Sign-in with Boxbe

Essentially, when you enable 2-step verification for your Google account, Google effectively disables (blocks) all third-party apps including those that use IMAP (Boxbe uses IMAP).  To re-enable access for a third-party application such as Boxbe, you must explicitly generate a password using Google’s own special password generator and then provide that password to the application (to Boxbe).

You may wish to view the video referenced above (and here again) for additional explanation.

Step by Step Instructions  

If you have enrolled in 2-step verification, you should:

1)   Go to Google’s setup 2-step verification page (opens in new window).  Once setup for 2-step verification, you will need to generate a password.

2)   You should then be taken to Google’s authorizing applications & sites page to generate a password for use with Boxbe.  Save this password.

3)   Navigate to the Boxbe Email Enrollment Status Page and log in (opens in new window).

4)   For your Gmail account to be reset in Boxbe you will need to re-establish the link by clicking on “disable” first (next to the email you are enrolling in 2-step verification).  Once the email is visible in the Other Addresses section, click on “enable”…  You will be prompted to enter your password.

5)   Enter the newly generated Google password into the password field (please note that this is not the field to your Boxbe account).

6)   When this is complete, you will no longer need to enter the generated password, as it is a one-time process.

And congratulations: You’re Done!

Note: To turn off 2-step verification, instructions by Google are provided here.

Please write to support@boxbe.com if you require any assistance for any Boxbe service issues.

Boxbe, in collaboration with Yahoo!, has expunged the Waiting List message layout issue!  Click here for original issue announcement.

Yahoo! account waiting lists are now back in top working order.  We thank you for your patience and immutable user-ship!

Due to a display problem introduced in a recent Yahoo upgrade, you may have discovered that messages in your Waiting List are showing up a little strange looking…see sample picture for reference.  The body of the message is showing up twice and the convenience links that Boxbe provides are not in the place they should be.

Along with Yahoo!, we are pursuing a fix for this bug at this very moment. We thank you for your patience as we enjoy tackling the intruding gremlin.

Some of you may have noticed that the relevance ranking which Boxbe assigns to messages from unapproved senders (sometimes called a “spam score”, or the 1-10 ranking) is not as accurate or consistent as before.  This is because this feature is now partially disabled.

Within the next month or so Boxbe will remove this feature completely. The reason we are removing message rankings is that the mainstream ISPs (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo!) have become much better at correctly placing email in the Inbox or the Spam folder.  In addition, computing the relevance score is an expensive operation for Boxbe to perform, so it makes sense to rely upon the ISPs good work.

Not to worry, we will still be analyzing each of your messages and considering your preference settings when deciding what to do with them.

* FYI we’re excited! – In future months, we’ll be focusing our development efforts in some new areas and we look forward to sharing them with you as they happen!

Have Questions?  Check this out…

Boxbe provides a great deal of user help and support.  From our FAQ list and How It Works page, to our user-control panels and our Blog you are currently reading!

We also provide a technical support email for any personal issues, comments or suggestions that might arise: support@boxbe.com.

Some Boxbe insight can also be found in following video:

Our Friends of Friends/Contacts of Friends feature has been disabled for the time being.  Boxbe has been named a defendant in a patent suit, and while we do not believe the patent to be valid or that Boxbe’s service infringes, we have in good faith disabled this feature.  Sometimes great ideas are taken, to be protected under law, keeping those others who think of them from being able to use them.

We understand this may be a little unsettling to those of you who found the feature to be particularly useful, but “grieve not you; you who are welcome notwithstanding”; Boxbe’s superb system is still robustly distinctive!  And our user community continues to grow vigorously.

Shakespeare, William.  The Merchant of Venice.  V. I. 216-262.