Boxbe Blog

You may have noticed some changes to the way our junk rating system works in your Waiting List in the last week. Messages that were put in your Waiting List between May 24th and May 31st may have a higher junk rating than you might have expected. NOTE: this should have only affected Yahoo! Mail and Public Email Address users. Boxbe for Outlook users were not affected by this change.

We have since modified our rating systems to behave more like they did before the changes that occurred on the 24th.

Why did this happen?

We had a service outage last Saturday that resulted in a necessary upgrade to the machines that apply junk ratings to incoming email. Upon upgrading those machines to a new version of our software, some of the tweaks that we had been making to our junk ratings got pushed out before they were fully baked.

We think we have gotten everything back to normal, but we may be making tweaks over the next several days.

Feedback please

Let us know if your junk ratings aren’t what you would expect them to be and stay tuned for some big improvements to the way Boxbe handles email.

Email us at support@boxbe.com.

Now here’s a company after my own heart.

Last week, Greendimes landed $20 million in venture capital funding to expand their business.

Greendimes claims to be able to reduce junk mail landing in your snail mail box by 90%. They contact credit card, catalog and other direct mailers on your behalf to get them to stop sending you unwanted mail.

I haven’t signed up for the service yet, but I can tell you that if it works, at $36 a year, it’s probably worth it. I posted a series about reclaiming your physical mailbox back in March. My attempts to decrease junk mail at home have been only somewhat successful and I’ve spent many hours on the phone and filling out forms. While it does seem like I’m receiving less mail overall, it certainly hasn’t stopped altogether.

Having someone like Greendimes watching your back might be just the trick.

Others talking about Greendimes
GigaOm
Earth2Tech
Brian Berliner

Check out their blog for other green tips.

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

Infernal spam: Blocking e-mails constant struggle - Tulsa World

And apparently, incredibly expensive.

The tools may be effective, but for businesses like Bank of Oklahoma that run their own e-mail servers, they can be expensive. Brian Foster, senior vice president of information security at BOk, said a system to protect the company’s 3,000 to 6,000 unique addresses costs $30,000 to $50,000.

The article goes on to talk about the ever changing face of spam and the efforts at the Bank of Oklahoma to thwart it.

Why is Gmail still in beta
Good question, Esquire Magazine. We were wondering the same thing.

Gmail rolls out PowerPoint preview
Looks like Google might be getting closer to a full office suite. Yesterday, Google unveiled PowerPoint within Gmail. While you can’t create PowerPoint in Gmail, it sure seems like a good place to store them.

Oh, look you’re still getting plenty of spam
Techdirt has a sarcastic (and accurate) article about how putting one spammer in jail really just scratches the surface of the spam epidemic.

And speaking of jailed spammers -

Spam King denied bail
Our man in the can apparently will be staying there.

photo from Flickr user TheAlieness

Guy Kawasaki is my hero.

I’ve been a fan of Guy’s since he was an evangelist at Apple back in the good (and bad) old days.

He had my dream job - go out and tell everyone about products that change the world. Fortunately, I’ve been able to follow in Guy’s footsteps.

Evangelist, Entreprenuer, Author

Guy has had a amazing career. He created the field of corporate evangelism at Apple back in the 1980’s. He has started his own companies. Most recently, Guy Kawasaki spends his days as a venture capitalist, popular blogger and bestselling author.

Reading Guy’s books are like getting an MBA in product marketing (minus about $50k in tuition). From his marketing and strategy doctrine, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, to his manual on creating a startup company, The Art of the Start, to his new product and marketing creation manifesto, Rules for Revolutionaries, Guy is blessed with gift of being able to break through all the BS and boil down the essentials of what you need to do to make your product fly.

Needless to say, Guy Kawasaki’s books and blog postings are extremely helpful when starting a company or building a new product. Given all the help Guy has given us, we’d like to return the favor.

How Guy Kawasaki Could Use Boxbe

Man… so many uses of Boxbe for Guy, I don’t even know where to begin. I could give Guy some of the same advice I gave Lifehacker blogger, Gina Trapani for her blog, but perhaps a more novel approach would be to use Boxbe to filter pitches for his VC firm, Garage Technology Ventures.

Boxbe’s value proposition centers around the age old concept that time is money. Now, Guy Kawasaki is a busy man and it shouldn’t be free to waste his time with unwanted email and pitches for startup companies that are stupid. I bet a lot of these guys don’t even read his rules for pitching a VC.

5 Easy Steps

Guy - here’s what you can do to weed out the people who don’t follow your rules (or are otherwise irritating).

1. Sign up with Boxbe.
2. Set your access price to $99 (our current maximum).
3. Post your new email address on your blog.
4. Wait for pitches (this shouldn’t take long).
5. If the pitches waste your time, collect $99.

You could take one of your other, smarter investments to dinner with the money. Alternatively, you could give the money to charity - or keep it. You pick.

What about everybody else?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a VC or famous blogger to use Boxbe. Anyone who has a problem with spam or unwanted email can use Boxbe and just act like you are.

photo by Dave Sifry on Flickr

It’s no secret that we love the Lifehacker blog (and lifehacking in general) here at Boxbe. We love all the efficiency it brings our lives and the general philosophy that things can always be better. Gmail tips, getting rid of junk snail mail, unix hacking, plugins to improve our experience on popular web sites, what’s not to love?

Who is Gina Trapani?

Well, the blog doesn’t just write and edit itself, folks. And we think that Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding Editor and efficiency wünderkind, is the bee’s knees. Being Editor of Lifehacker, one of the most popular blogs on the internet, Gina doesn’t just sit around waiting for her blogger minions to write up posts so she can nitpick vocabulary and spelling, Gina normally writes about 6 posts a day and two weekly features. Many of those posts are tips emailed in from readers.

Besides being a brave soul who actually has an email address on her personal blog, Lifehacker has a public email address on every single page to their tips hotline.

I can only imagine how much spam and unwanted email she must receive. Given all the help Gina has given us, we’d like the opportunity to return the favor.

How to use Boxbe

One way Gina could use Boxbe would be to make all of the people submitting their tips to Lifehacker prove that they are human with our simple captcha test. Better yet, to prevent marketers from over running her inbox with pitches, she could simply set her contact price to $.10. That way, she could quickly weed out everyone who wasn’t serious about getting her attention by collecting a dime from every submitter who was marketing to her. She’s not going to get rich off of this, but it does raise the bar to reach Gina.

Her posts show that Gina Trapani is a power user of Google’s Gmail. Arguably, she might know Gmail better than anyone. She’s even created a plugin to make it better. We’ve added our own improvements to Gmail by integrating Boxbe into the service. The process is free and easy and can dramatically improve the quality of email that you receive in Gmail.

Boxbe does this by reducing your inbox to only the email that you want to read and leaving the rest in our quarantine. In practice, we accomplish this by allowing emails from people who are pre-approved in your white list, that take a test to prove they are human or pay a fee.

But Gmail has a spam filter…

Despite Gmail’s wonderful spam filter, unwanted emails and spam do slip through. We’re firm believers that filter based solutions to stop spam simply won’t work in the long run. Ultimately, the war on spam is an arms race and the good guys are losing. Market based solutions like ours are really the only long term solution getting rid of unwanted email and spam.

While you might not be a famous blogger, I bet you do have a problem with spam. Just like Gina and the crew at Lifehacker, we’re here to help.

photo from Flickr user rcrowley

A few days ago, Domain Keys Identified Mail or DKIM, was approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). DKIM is one of the standards that we use at Boxbe to keep your email safe from phishing attacks and fake emails in general.

What is DKIM?

From Yahoo:

DKIM is an email authentication framework that addresses the widespread issue of email forgery, using cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. It allows email providers to validate an email’s originating domain, making use of blacklists and whitelists more effective. It also makes phishing attacks easier to detect by helping to identify abusive domains.

DKIM is good for the internet and will help detect forged email addresses. However, DKIM alone won’t stop spam originating from non-faked addresses nor will it stop other forms of unwanted email. Email expert Richi Jennings says “At best, they give a partial indication whether a message is spam or not, but their main use is to allow recipients to look up the reputation of the sending domain.”

The UK’s PC Advisor says “To make it work, DKIM now has to be adopted and incorporated by independent software vendors into their email applications and related infrastructures.”

That said, this is a step forward in stopping phishing schemes and other illegal activities that originate from non-authenticated senders and we are happy to see the DKIM standard approved and hopefully more widely adopted.

More about DKIM

DKIM Workgroup
DKIM FAQ
Yahoo! Anecdotal

More discussion of the standard approval

Promising antispam technique gets nod - CNET News
IETF backs new cryptographic scheme to battle the effects of spam - Ars Technica
Junked: Is this the end of spam and spoof email? - Silicon.com
Bye Bye Spam and Phishing with DKIM? - Slashdot.org
New Spec Could Cut Phishing, Spam - Dark Reading
IETF approves DKIM to fight spam and phishing - A Canadian Geek
Why DKIM will fail - Spin on Cue
Promising new anti-spam techique gains key approval - Geeks Are Sexy

photo from Flickr user lordcuauhtli

We launched two enhancements yesterday afternoon to the Boxbe Quarantine: Junk Ratings and Message Search. Both features are designed to help you get through your quarantine folder more quickly and easily.

Junk Ratings

Our new junk rating is a way to make sifting through your quarantine easier. We’ve rated messages on a scale of one through ten based on what we think is more or less likely to be email that you would want.

Messages are also color coded like a stop light for quick scanning.

Green = least likely to be junk mail.
Yellow = somewhat likely to be junk mail.
Red = most likely junk mail.

As no spam filter is perfect, the junk rating numbers are meant as a guide to help you get through your quarantine more quickly. However, like any guide, use your own judgment when managing your quarantine.

Message Search

We’ve added the ability to search senders and subjects to find messages, senders or domains that you might want to approve. This search does not include the contents of the messages, rather just senders and subjects.

Message search works with the other filters on top of your quarantine, so you can specify dates and status as part of your search.

We hope you like our new enhancements.

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

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.

Do you get too much (snail) mail? I do. If you would like to receive less mail, I’ve collected a few ways that can help you decrease the amount of postal mail you receive.

Unsolicited Mail

The Direct Marketing Association of America has set up a service that for $1, they will add your name and address to their “Mail Preference Service.” What does your $1 get you? The site claims that it “will substantially decrease the amount of national advertising mail you receive,” but “not all commercial mail will stop.” It does take a 30-90 days for this service to become effective, but it sounds like a good way to cut back on marketing messages being delivered to your home.

Catalogs

If you’re like me, you receive a number of catalogs in the mail every month. If you have conducted business with any of the catalogs you receive, the above DMA Mail Preference Service may not decrease the number of catalogs you receive.

To remove yourself from catalog mail lists, you’ll probably have to call the catalog company directly, as through my research, their doesn’t seem to be any quick, free way to do this online. To speed the process along, make sure that you have your customer number with you. Customer numbers are near the mailing address on the front or back of the catalog.

Services

I’ve found two services (41 Pounds and Green Dimes) that claim to do all the work for you. I’ve not used them, but using a service might be easier than what I’ve suggested.

Last, here are a couple links with more detailed information about how to shut off specific kinds of postal mail you might not want.

• How to Get Less Junk Mail - CPSR
• Do-it-yourself - Stop junk mail, email and phone calls

I’ve used a few of these techniques personally so I’ll report back as I start to see results. I’m curious to hear if about any other tips you might have. If you have other tips, please share them below.

photo by Flickr user Casey Serin

In a previous post, we talked about how much time it takes to get rid of unwanted mail. Unlike email marketing, direct marketing via postal mail is expensive as they have printing and postage costs.

Email marketers still have to pay to acquire a list of email addresses and to design the email, but largely, the cost of email marketing is carried by the recipients (READ: you and me) in evaluating that email’s value. By charging marketers for your time, many marketers will refine the messages that they send.

But what makes us think marketers will pay? We think they will pay for your attention because they already do.

US Postal Service

I get a lot of mail in my (snail mail) mailbox every day. Usually, our small mailbox is stuffed full of mail. And most of that mail I didn’t request.

Typically, I get 3 kinds of unwanted mail:

• Grocery store inserts
• Catalogs
• Letters/Fliers

I was curious about how much marketers spend to reach me, so I started doing a little research online. Poking around a bit on the USPS website, I discovered their rate calculator for sending commercial mail. They divide commercial mail into several categories.

Standard Mail

Standard mail is the mail that doesn’t seem like mail at all. Standard mail is typically composed of loose fliers from grocery and other local stores, letters sent to “Resident” or any piece of mail that you receive that isn’t addressed to a person. Standard mail is big business for the USPS as it made up almost half of their revenue last year.

Using the USPS’ handy bulk postage calculator, I determined that it costs about $.16 for a 1.7 oz grocery store flyer via standard mail. Naturally, this doesn’t include printing costs, so this isn’t a total cost, but it is a good basis to work from.

Standard mail indiscriminately targets neighborhoods, cities and regions and isn’t targeted beyond the geographic boundaries.

Catalogs

By comparison to standard mail, catalogs are very expensive. By using the same calculator, I calculated my recently received catalogs of 6, 10 and 14 oz in weight, cost $.44, $.51 and $.57 respectively to send. Again, this doesn’t include printing, but where the grocery store flyer was printed on newsprint and unbound, the catalog from the furniture store was printed on high quality glossy paper, which is substantially more expensive.

Catalogs are more targeted, so in theory, the recipient might buy more from that retailer.

So, how much are you worth?

So, what does all this mean? By calculating one cost, bulk rates for direct mail marketing, we’ve established that marketers are willing to pay to get some of your attention. From my own non-scientific study of my mailbox, those marketers are paying somewhere in between $.16 and $.57 for each piece of mail sent.

While we aren’t planning on opening a direct mail division any time soon, we think some of that money ought to be going to you.

We’ve talked about the cost of unwanted email in previous posts, but what about unwanted paper or snail mail?

US Postal Service

In a given week, it’s safe to say that my household receives at least 3-5 credit card offers, 5 catalogs, 4 or 5 grocery fliers and scads of other mail that we never asked for. A very small percentage of the stack of mail is something that I either asked for or actually care about.

I know that I’m not alone in this. The US Postal Service, in their 2006 annual report, states that they send over 102 billion pieces of “Standard Mail” each year. Standard mail, by the way, is composed of loose fliers from grocery and other local stores, letters sent to “Resident” or any piece of mail that you receive that isn’t addressed to someone.

This number doesn’t include the 90 billion pieces of first class mail that is sent each year. First class mail is the regular addressed messages that you receive which could include hand written notes from your aunt or pictures of your 3 year old niece. Sadly, I don’t receive many of those kinds of messages, so most first class mail is unrequested as well.

The cost of uninvited mail

Unlike email, most postal mail must be closely inspected before you dispose of it. The dozens of credit card and mortgage offers I receive monthly contain sensitive information about me or my family. That information offers up an opportunity for identity theft. All of these messages need to be shredded. G

In a previous post about the cost to my time, I established some figures for the wages of the average American, I spend another 5 minutes a day disposing of postal mail and another 15 minutes a week at the shredder.

$18.50 an hour x 21 hours per year = $388.50.  

plus

15 minutes a week x 52 weeks * $18.50 = $240

Added together, unwanted mail costs you about $628 or 34 hours per year in lost time. Ouch.

Identity Theft?

Now, you could argue that I’m overly paranoid when it comes to shredding financial documents, but the cost of having your identity stolen is considerably higher. According to a study by the Identity Theft Resource Center, it takes on average about 330 hours to recover from identity theft.

330 hours x $18.50 = $6,105

There are about 10 million victims of identity theft per year in the US and according to the U.S. Department of Justice Statistics, identity theft is now passing up drug trafficking as the number one crime in the nation.

Long story short, buy a shredder folks.

What’s next?

I’ve looked at the costs of unwanted mail for individuals, but what about the companies that send it? Finally, I’ll end with some tips on how to lower the amount of unwanted mail you receive and help regain some of the your lost time and productivity.

photo by Flickr user MrBG

In an earlier post, I mentioned a spammer who was phishing getting convicted and facing up to a 101 years in prison as a result. But what exactly is phishing?

Photo by Flickr user thermodynamix

Wikipedia defines phishing as

“a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures.”

In a nutshell, phishing is something criminals do to trick people into giving them sensitive information. The stolen information is then used by the criminal for further illicit activities.

Boxbe and phishing

So, what does Boxbe do about phishing? First, the only email that you receive when using Boxbe is from senders that you have approved, have passed a human test or have paid a fee. Second, we use two emerging industry standards, SPF and DomainKeys to increase the likelihood that the sender isn’t spoofing or faking their email address.

Is it a 100% solution? No. Unfortunately, we can’t guard against all forms of social engineering or deception. What we can do is guard against emails from entering your inbox that make false claims as to their point of origin. The rest is up to you.

Learn more about phishing

We suggest that everyone educate themselves against phishing. Here are some great places to learn more about phishing:

• Microsoft - Recognizing phishing scams and fraudulent emails
• Tips from Fraud.org
• Paypal Security Center
• CNET - How to avoid phishing scams