Boxbe Blog

We get praise and love from our adoring fans on a regular basis, but one consistent request is to make getting email from real humans easier.

Keeping your Guest List up to date isn’t an easy job. When friends change jobs or their ISPs, their email addresses change with them.

Boxbe helps you get email from people who matter to you. The problem is, you don’t always know who is going to matter to you.

Today, I’m happy to announce a feature to make using Boxbe a lot easier.

Friends

Who are your friends? If you are like me, I have hundreds of contacts on my Boxbe Guest List. Some of them are email addresses from companies like Amazon or Facebook.

The bulk of my Guest List, however, is composed of friends, family and co-workers. We’ve consolidated this group of people into a group called “Friends.”

Friends of friends

So, why should you designate someone as a friend?

If you mark someone as a friend on your Guest List and they are a Boxbe member, anyone that they have designated as a friend can email you as well.

This takes a little of the difficulty of having to update your Guest List to ensure delivery of messages from your friends. You don’t have to mark them as a friend and you can block them if it’s someone you don’t want to hear from.

How it works

As an example, this is what happens when I add Mark as a friend.

When I add Mark as a friend, all of his friends can then email me without taking a test or paying a fee. If we have a lot of mutual friends, and he updates a change in their information first, I won’t have to.

We’re adhering to the proverb that many hands make light work.

Privacy

While we’re extending your Guest List to your friends, we won’t show others a list of who you have made a friend. The only way someone will know who your friends are is if they email them. Any email that you receive from a Friend of a Friend will be marked as such.

Here is how it will look in Yahoo! Mail:

Feedback?

We’re pretty happy with what we’ve released, but please let us know if there is anything we can do to make it better.

We’re constantly thinking of ways to make Boxbe easier to use and think this will help you get emails from people who matter to you most.

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.”