Boxbe Blog

Here’s a little video we did to better describe how Boxbe can help you say goodbye to email overload. Please share it with your friends!

This video can also be seen on our How It Works page.

Wanted to thank Scott Gilbertson over at Wired for a thorough overview of Boxbe’s service and how to get it set up. Scott interviewed Boxbe CEO Thede Loder last week and I helped give him a demo of the service.

Here’s a quote from the story:

Borrowing some ideas from IM and social networking, Boxbe adds a privilege system to your inbox which allows you to create an e-mail “friends list,” much like those on social sites. It’s designed to help narrow down your e-mail workflow so you can focus more closely on the people who matter to you.

While Scott gives the most thorough overview of any media outlet to date, we’ll preview more of the site later this week.

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.”

Today Google acquired anti-spam and security company Postini. Postini offers a host of services for businesses around communications security, but the reason I mention them is they are best known for their hosted anti-spam solution. Sound familiar?

According to the Google blog, Google acquired Postini as Google Apps “needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community.”

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall quotes Google’s Eric Schmidt saying “With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users — they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations.”

More specifically, Bill Burnham thinks that this is a pretty clear signal that Google is going after Microsoft’s Exchange business.

What does Postini do for Google’s bottom line? Om Malik on GigaOm believes that Google’s acquisitions are mirroring Cisco’s “buy and grow” strategy that built them into the networking giant they are today.

Finally, Fred Wilson (aka “A VC”) commented today on what Google ought to do with Postini post acquisition.

1 – allow me to search my quarantined mail…
2 – figure out how to stop grabbing verification emails…
3 – let me manage my quarantined mail in the gmail interface…
4 – let me see the reputation of the sender in the quarantined mailbox…

Thankfully, we’ve got Fred covered on 3 of his 4 requests (and we’ll have #3 for Yahoo! Mail soon).

Congrats to Postini on the acquisition.

More coverage of the Postini and Google announcement:

SearchEngineLand
Huffington Post
alarm clock

Web 2.0 video interviewer extraordinaire, Eddie Codel spent the afternoon in Boxbe offices two weeks ago talking to Thede Loder, Boxbe CEO about our service. Thede explains the ins and outs of Boxbe and gives Eddie the low down on what we’re all about.

Click below to watch the video.

This morning’s Seattle PI cover story reports that alleged spammer, Robert Soloway has been arrested under a provision of the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act.

AP Legal Affairs Writer, Gene Johnson reports that Robert Soloway is being held on “a 35-count indictment … charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.”

Soloway has previously lost two civil lawsuits resulting in fines of seven and ten million dollars, but this is his first criminal indictment.

“He’s one of the top 10 spammers in the world,” said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company’s Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. “He’s a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.”

Allegedly, Robert Soloway was using so-called “Zombie” computers (or botnets) to create his attacks. Federal agents have been quoted as saying that Soloway was responsible for billions of spam emails and that we should expect a drop in spam as a result of his arrest.

Spam Wars author, Danny Goodman disagrees:

I don’t care how big a spammer Soloway allegedly is; his contribution to the 63 billion spam messages per day (Ironport) can’t be so big that we’ll even notice the absence. Additionally, there is no way of knowing how much of his process is automated and already in the hopper waiting to spew. Also, he was taken into custody before 8:00am PDT yesterday. Spam volume here yesterday was (alas) quite normal.

We tend to agree with Danny as we’ve seen no marked decrease in quarantined messages, but nevertheless, it’s good to see such a notorious spammer brought to justice.

More discussion and commentary

Slashdot
CNET
Richi Jennings
Valleywag
John C. Dvorak
Tingog.com
Boing Boing
Download Squad
TechDirt

image by Flickr user r80o

Boxbe has been included in a poll on Valleywag today to select the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. We might be a little north, but we’d sure love your vote! We’re in with some pretty stiff competition from a lot bigger companies, so tell your friends, neighbors, coworkers, heck, anyone who will listen to go vote for us on Valleywag!

VOTE HERE

(more…)

Our mention in the Economist and recent Gmail integration stirred up the blogosphere a bit. Here are a few of the reactions.

Working the Crowd – IT for Financial Services @ BC
“Instead of using filters, Boxbe has developed software that essentially acts like a “toll booth”"

Monetizing the Attention Economy – Madisonian.net
“…technologies enables the user to capture some of the value now “appropriated” by marketers and advertisers competing for their attention, and “free-riding” off of their attention data.”

Daily Round Up – Crowdsourcing
“Will only people who have something valuable to say make the effort to send a message to you?”

Another cool feature from Boxbe – Ronnie’s Tech Blog
“Boxbe is on a roll lately! They now have the ability to filter your Gmail account.”

Thanks everyone for your comments!

Gratuitous kitten photo by fofurasfelinas

We’ve crossed the Atlantic with our latest press mention. In this quarter’s technology supplement, the Economist mentioned Boxbe in an article about new businesses that enable users to control their personal data.

“[Boxbe] sets out to address the problem of junk e-mail. Rather than using blacklists and using blacklists and filters to stop unwanted messages reaching their in-boxes, why not charge advertisers for permission to send promotional messages? That is the philosophy behind Boxbe for its “negotiated email delivery” service. It works rather like an automatic tollbooth between the internet and your in-box, deciding which traffic to let through, and how much to charge.”

If you are a subscriber to the Economist, you can read the whole article online here.

We think that Boxbe and bloggers are a natural fit. We like the idea that people can post their Boxbe address on their blogs without fear of unwanted emails. I love getting email from readers and I imagine many other bloggers would like to be reachable as well.

Here’s a quick roundup of bloggers talking about Boxbe.

• Cristian Eslava (en Espanol)
• MacBros Place
• Digital Guides, Hacks and Tips
• Accidental Events, Dreams and Travels

Thanks everyone! We hope you love the service.

Thede and Corbett were interviewed on Thursday last week by the CBS 47 team in Fresno. Check out the video below to get a brief overview of what we do here at Boxbe.

Read more at CBS 47.