Boxbe Blog

Today, we’re announcing that our Boxbe for Outlook add-in is available to everyone for download. While it still has some rough edges, unlike a lot of other betas, we’ve been testing this add-in both internally and with a sizable number of beta testers for several months.

What is Boxbe for Outlook?

We’ve encapsulated all the functionality of the Boxbe website into an easy to use plugin for use with Microsoft Outlook.

Following is a little introduction to our latest product, Boxbe for Outlook.

Automatic Guest List Creation

The Boxbe for Outlook plugin looks through your list of contacts, past emails and email messages that you have sent to others, to create your Guest List quickly and get you started using Boxbe.

Once you have created your Guest List, email from people on your Guest List will go directly to your Inbox as they have before, while email from people that are not on your Guest List will go to your boxbe Waiting List folder.

Waiting List and Junk Ratings

If someone emails you that is not on your Guest List, that message is sent to your Waiting List folder and Boxbe determines how likely that message is to be spam.

Messages are rated on a scale from 1 to 10 on their likelihood that they are spam. Messages that score low are less likely to be spam and messages that score high are more likely to be spam.

Boxbe Junk Ratings quickly separate the good from the bad.

Fast Setup, Easy to Use

Depending on the size of your list of contacts and mailboxes, setup usually takes a couple of minutes. Once you are set up, adding new senders to your Guest List is a snap. We add a toolbar to Outlook that gives you quick access to the tools you’ll use after setup.

Approve Senders
Clicking “Add Sender” will add the sender of the email that you are currently reading to your Guest List. Adding to your Guest List ensures that that person can easily email you again.

Approve Domains
If you get a lot of email from a particular domain (example: your company or an organization that you belong to), you can quickly add the domain to your Guest List as well.

Protect multiple email addresses

One of the best things about Boxbe for Outlook is that you can protect any or all of the email addresses that you access via Microsoft Outlook. The Guest List that you create for one email address will work across all the email accounts that you choose for Boxbe to protect.

Get Boxbe for Outlook

You can get Boxbe for Outlook by signing up for Boxbe or adding an email address to your existing Boxbe account here.

System requirements:
Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007
Windows Vista or Windows XP

We hope you like the new plugin but if you have any difficulty using Boxbe for Outlook or have any questions, email us support@boxbe.com.

A big thank you to our friends over at Yahoo! Developer Network for making Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail an Editor’s Pick in the Yahoo! Gallery today.

Yahoo! Gallery, in case you didn’t know, is the site that Yahoo! uses to show off sites and services that use Yahoo! technologies. As you all know, Boxbe integrates tightly with Yahoo! Mail, making it so you don’t have to leave Yahoo! Mail to use the Boxbe service.

You may not know that we use the awesome Yahoo! Mail API to power Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail. Without the API, Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail wouldn’t be so nicely integrated with Yahoo! Mail.

What’s an API?

Sometimes living in the world of developers, we forget that most normal folks don’t know what an API is. Wikipedia’s definition is

“An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.”

Ok, that probably didn’t help much…

Essentially, an API is the way we access your Yahoo! Mail account with Yahoo!’s (and your) blessing. We use tools Yahoo! has built for people outside the company to enhance their existing services.

The folks at Yahoo! know that they can’t be all things to all people so they let companies like ours further individualize their services.

Yahoo! Gallery Pick

We’re happy that our Yahoo! Mail product has been made a pick on the Yahoo! Gallery.

Thanks again, Yahoo!

We’ve got a bunch of new features in the pipeline, but I almost forgot to mention some refinements we’ve made to the site recently.

Email Addresses page

We’ve made it a lot easier to update email addresses that you are using with Boxbe. By going to your Email Addresses page, you can maintain, enable, disable or add new email addresses to be protected by Boxbe.

To protect a new email address, you can either add it at the top of the Email Addresses page

or from your Dashboard page.

Once you type the email address in, you’ll be guided through the process to protect that email address using Boxbe.

We hope this makes it easier to add email addresses to your Boxbe account. If you have any problems or difficulties with this or any other feature, send email to support@boxbe.com.

With the recent relaunch of our site, I thought this might be an opportune moment to better explain what Boxbe is and how we can help you.

Beyond Email 2.0

Email is an essential tool that we use in all areas of our lives, personal and professional. Yet it has not kept pace with the way people communicate.

Email as we know it is broken. It hasn’t changed with the times and many people claim to be abandoning email and young people aren’t adopting it.

Boxbe is a service that lets you easily create an email guest list so that you can make sure you receive email messages from people who matter to you.

Boxbe Guest List

A Boxbe Guest List works like lists on popular social networking sites – it protects and guarantees the delivery of email from friends, family, co-workers or even entire domains.

When you first sign up, Boxbe scans your existing email folders and address book to create a Guest List that includes all the people you’ve recently and frequently emailed. The Guest List is live and dynamic and automatically includes new people you want to receive email from, so your friends are already included

When you receive an email from someone you have not already pre-approved, you can opt to approve the sender. She will then be added to your Boxbe Guest List. We are adapting email for the social networking generation.

Boxbe cleans up your inbox

Inboxes are filled with unwanted messages, making it hard to find the things you do want. Or sometimes important messages are marked as junk by an over zealous spam filter.

Boxbe cleans up your inbox and guarantees emails from people who matter, and stops those that are unwanted.

It works with your existing email

Boxbe is designed for the millions of email users who want better control of their email. Boxbe works with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Outlook.

Boxbe for Your Domain is in beta testing – it and more services will be rolled out in 2008!

Never miss an important message

Ever miss an important email because it got marked as spam?

Boxbe ranks incoming messages from 1-10, and color codes them. The lower the number, the better the message.

Green messages mean likely good, yellow means caution and red means bad. If your Aunt Hilda just changed her email address, she will likely get a low score marked green. However, a sender that isn’t who they claim to be will get a high score marked red.

Give spammers the heave-ho

Boxbe empowers you to choose which people or businesses can reach you. Anyone who isn’t on your Guest List will receive a request to verify their message before it is delivered to your inbox. Legitimate marketers who want to reach you have the option of paying a small fee that you set so that they can get their message through to you.

Unverified messages are held in your Waiting List for you to review, and approve or decline at anytime.

In a nutshell

Boxbe helps you sift through the barrage of email you receive on a daily basis. We’re here to uncomplicate your inbox and help you get to the messages you want to receive.

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

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

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.

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