Boxbe Blog

Yesterday, I posted some male names that were still available from Boxbe, today, I’ll do the same for all the females in the audience.

I also mentioned yesterday that it really stinks getting an obscure email address. None of your friends can remember it easily. If you are meeting people for the first time, giving SusanB9875 doesn’t really stick in short term memory.

There is a counter view to all of this, however.

I worked at Yahoo! back in the 1990’s and I was fortunate (so I thought) to get randy@yahoo.com. Very memorable and (unfortunately) highly spammed. Sometimes bulk emailers resort to merely sending email to X @ Y.com, replacing X with every name in a dictionary. As you might imagine, I received a lot of unwanted email and sadly, I gave up the address due to that burden.

Having a good name at Boxbe, on the other hand, won’t fall victim to the same shenanigans. As I’ve mentioned before, you only receive email from people in your Boxbe address book, people who pass a test or pay a fee, so you’re only getting the email that you want.

Without further ado, here are some of the popular women’s names still available on Boxbe.

• Mary
• Patricia
• Linda
• Maria
• Susan
• Margaret
• Dorothy
• Betty
• Helen
• Sandra
• Donna
• Carol

More after the link

(more…)

The personal access price is one of the key technologies we use to help people remove unwanted and unsolicited email. Effectively, it puts a price tag on your attention. Senders who are not pre-approved must either take a short test or pay a small fee to reach you.

When Boxbe collects a fee, we share with you the amount you specify. You can donate the funds you collect to a charity of your choice (we make it easy), or keep them for your own use.

Personal Access Price

So, why a personal access price? There are a lot of solutions out there for refining the contents of your inbox. Most solutions center around spam detection and removal. But spam detection doesn’t really work if your goal is to eliminate unwanted email.

Besides the obvious arms race between spammers and anti-spam tools, we believe that the actual definition of spam is a personal one. To me, spam is unwanted email. Unwanted email is any email that didn’t add some value to my day. Rather, those emails cost me something, my time.

People ask, aren’t you just another spam solution? In short, no. Boxbe makes it easier to receive valuable emails and decrease the emails you don’t want to receive. As a result, a delightful side effect of our service is spam removal.

Your time, your money

In the end, we’re trying enable people to take more control of their attention. Like Tivo and the iPod, we want you to have choices about how you spend your time. Life is too short to be dealing with unwanted email.

Boxbe helps you trade (and be compensated for) your time and attention. Your attention is valuable to advertisers if an offer you read influences what you or someone else later buys. If reading an offer makes you just slightly more likely to make or recommend a purchase, it may be worthwhile to send, even if an advertiser must pay.

We have more information about the personal access price in the FAQ.

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

Score one for the good guys.

photo by Flickr user assbach

Goodin, who was arrested last year, was found guilty of operating a sophisticated phishing scheme, the prosecutors said in the statement. As part of the scam, he sent e-mails posing as AOL’s billing department to trick people into giving up their credit card information, according to the statement. He then used the credit card data to make purchases, prosecutors said Tuesday.

While he won’t get a 101 years for just spamming, this case is a perfect example of how spam can be tremendously harmful to people.

Be careful out there.

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