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

Also, we periodically update our Twitter feed with answers to questions that folks might have and letting people know about issues that crop up from time to time.

Follow Boxbe on Twitter

Hope you had a great holiday and we’re looking forward to a helping your tame your inbox mess in 2009!

[photo by jurvetson]

Thede, Thomas and I are heading to down to Sunnyvale tomorrow for Yahoo! Hack Day. Hopefully, we’ll be hacking together the future of Boxbe while we are there.

We use the Yahoo! Mail API to make Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail work and we’ll be adding their Address Book API very soon so that we’re not using that not-so-nice anti-pattern we keep hearing about. We’re hoping to learn more about it and other APIs that Yahoo! is opening up.

Say Hi

If you are going to Hack Day and want to meet up, send me a note at randy@boxbe.com. Hope to see you there.

You can see the video that Yahoo! put together for their Hack Day.

photo from Flickr user, kjunstorm

I go to a few tech conferences every year, but in general, my favorite one is Gnomedex. It’s a great group of people and always an interesting set of speakers.

This year was especially nice as randomly, a woman walked up to me and says, “I love you guys.” I was a little startled at first, but then I realized she was one of the folks that follows Boxbe’s Twitter feed, An Bui. It seems we’d made her pretty happy with our Outlook plugin and how it killed spam from her inbox.

I was pretty stoked to get a little adulation for our service and remembered that after a recent survey we had received lots of great feedback about how we’d helped other people tame their inboxes, too.

Here are some quotes from the survey (which happened before we released Outlook). Thanks everyone for your kind words.

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail

“My ~10 year old Yahoo account is manageable once again.” - George B.

“I like that it gives me a chance to stop accepting emails from companies I don’t use any longer.”- Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I like this service because it is different from anything else I have experienced. I want others to have the same opportunity.” - Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I was about to abandon my yahoo account. now i don’t have to. thanks!” - Sharon S.

“I think Boxbe is awesome!” - Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“Can’t get any easier to use.” - Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“Thanks for fixing my Yahoo! I’d given up on using it about a year ago, and set it to vacation response. Now all those business cards are usable again. ;)” - Joseph K.

“You’ve got a big fan, and one who will share the information with friends soon.”- Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“I am a supporter, and I think your stuff generally works.” - Boxbe for Yahoo! user

“It catches the rest of the stuff Yahoo spam doesn’t so that my Inbox is spam-free.” - Tabatha L.

Public Email Address

“This is the most important email advance since Gmail in my book. It’s an entirely disruptive technology that serves as an electronic gatekeeper. [yes, you may use that as a quote]” - Boxbe for Yahoo! and Boxbe Public Email user

“There’s no more worry about attaching an email somewhere and having it harvested. That’s awesome.” - Boxbe for Yahoo! and Boxbe Public Email user

“It is a great email service to use as a public address.” - Boxbe Public Email user

General

“It does a great job of filtering my mail.” - Anna R.

“I’ve been happy with the results that I’ve noticed and recommended it for those same reasons.- Richard S.

“The program has eliminated alot of scrolling through unwanted emails just to get to the emails that I need to review.” - Patricia B.

“I really like it and how it allows me to define what is and isn’t spam.” - Brent C.

“I think it’s a cool service. A service that needs a little work, but cool enough to tell others about it.” - Ronnie M.
“Everyone needs this.” - Cindi G.

“I think it is wonderful.” - Darlene B.

“I don’t know of any other service that does this, and it seems like such a perfect solution.”- Robin L.

“You’ve tamed the red tide of junk mail in here. I see the real results in 1.5 days, literally within a day and a half, all the mail I want is in my in-box, and the stuff I don’t is in the pending folder.”- Andre L.

We have fixed a problem for users whose accounts are being enabled (and subsequently disabled again) receiving multiple notifications regarding the service going up and down.

If you have received numerous messages regarding the status of your account, you shouldn’t receive any more until we’ve resolved this issue.

Sorry for the delay in reactivating Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail, but rest assured we are tirelessly working on getting service working again.

We are actively working with Yahoo! to reinstate Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail for the affected users.

We’re terribly sorry for any inconvenience that this may be causing you, but rest assured we will have the service up and and running as soon as humanly possible.

We will keep you posted on the Boxbe Blog as we get to the bottom of this issue.

Here are some of the features we’ve just launched:

Always allow approved guests

Wondering why some messages from approved senders weren’t making it to your inbox? The new system allows messages from approved senders even if they fail authentication.

A simpler Guest List to make your life easier.

Auto Allow and Auto Block

Allow messages that have a low junk score to go directly to your inbox, and banish the ones with a high junk score from even showing up in your Waiting List. Save time - don’t worry about emails that are most and least likely to be good - Boxbe does the work for you.

Go to your threshold sliders now!

Universal Guest List

Use Boxbe’s convenient list of retailers, mailing lists, banks, social networks and other automated senders (no marketing or advertising emails, of course). It’s one more way Boxbe helps you save time.

Courtesy Notices are now optional

Many of you told us you don’t want to send Courtesy Notices to people not on your Guest List. They are now optional and they give you more control.

Choose who receives courtesy notices here.

Feedback?

Thanks for using Boxbe and we hope you like our new features. We love your feedback and we live on it. Please let us know what you think by responding to this email or emailing us at support@boxbe.com.

Struggling to Evade the Email Tsunami - The New York Times
Boxbe got a brief mention in this article from Randall Stross about people that are trying to get out from under their excessive email. No solutions for all the problems yet, but we’re trying :-).

Banish Those Pesky Spam and Phishing E-mails That Clog Up Your Inbox - Fox Business News
Fox Business New writer Donna Fuscaldo plays up Boxbe’s leveraging social networking to combat spam and phishing. “The free service, which works with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Outlook, lets users create a list of approved people who can send e-mail, similar to how instant messaging and social networking works.”

A Tale of Two Spammers and a Nice Solution
Now, here’s an interesting use of Boxbe to measure how many emails are sent from a couple of legitimate marketers. Giving out your Boxbe Public Email Address is demonstrated perfectly in this personal account by George Bounacos.

photo from flickr user Mr Magoo ICU

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.

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.

Update - we are taking a bit longer than anticipated. Please stand by.

Starting at 12:45 pm PDT. We’ll be back soon.

Essentially, due to a rapid increase in Boxbe users, Boxbe was shut out of using Yahoo! Mail’s API. Fortunately, we devised a way to make our service work better with Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail re-enabled Boxbe to access your account early this afternoon and the service should be up and running right now.

Thanks to our friends down at Yahoo! that helped us get Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail up and running again.

It will take us some time to catch up with all the email in your account, but we anticipate that everything will be running smoothly and back to normal in the next day or so.

We’re really sorry for the interruption in Boxbe service and hope that you didn’t receive too much unwanted mail in the mean time.

The silver lining to the service outage is that it gave us an opportunity adopt new practices to scale Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail to make our service available to even more users.

Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail is up and running. We’re sorry again for this inconvenience. We’ll post a further explanation later and measures that we are taking to avoid future outages.

Update 2: 1:37 PM May 6, 2008
After talking to Yahoo! Mail team further today, it appears that the large number of new people using Boxbe for their Yahoo! Mail may have been causing some trouble for a server on their end. We are actively making a change to how Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail works to better accommodate all of our new users.

Yahoo! assures us that making these changes will make for happier servers. Hopefully, we will have Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail up later this afternoon.

Update 1: 11:15 AM, May 6, 2008
We’ve talked to the good folks down at Yahoo! and we have figured out why Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail is down. We are actively working with Yahoo! to create a solution to this problem.

While I can’t give a time when we expect our Yahoo! Mail service to be up and running, we hope to have it working again really soon.

Thanks Ryan K for sending a direct tweet to me last night to help us out. We really appreciate it.

May 5, 2008
Earlier this evening, our Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail product experienced a service outage that we are still investigating.

You may have received an email earlier asking you to login to your Yahoo! Mail account as a result of this service outage. Unfortunately, logging into Yahoo! won’t fix this issue.

We’re terribly sorry for any inconvenience that this may be causing you, but rest assured we will have the service up and and running as soon as humanly possible.

We will keep you posted on the Boxbe Blog as we get to the bottom of this issue.

I took a lot of pictures at the event and I’m sharing them below. The new office is indeed warmer as a result. Thanks to everyone who came and joined in the fun.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Full Set on Flickr

Using the widget is really great for me as I meet a lot of people both in the “real world” and online. Ideally, I’d like anyone to be able to reach me easily. For non-Boxbe members, posting your email address on a blog is practically begging to buried in spam.

Fortunately, Boxbe members don’t have these concerns.

Where can I get it?

You can get a personalized widget for yourself on our email addresses page.

NOTE: This widget should work with any Javascript enabled blogging system.

We’ve tested this widget with Wordpress (self installed, not Wordpress.com) and Blogger and it works great in both places. We will be creating a simplified version of this widget for folks using blog systems that don’t allow Javascript on their sites soon.

Download it now

Show off your spam free lifestyle by pimping Boxbe’s new widget on your blog.

Get the widget

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!

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.

I’m hanging in Vancouver, Canada at the awesome social media and blogging conference Northern Voice conference.

Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference that’s being held at the Forestry Sciences Centre, 2424 Main Mall, UBC main campus, Vancouver, Canada on February 22-23, 2008. This is the 4th annual incarnation of this event, see the 2005, 2006 and 2007 websites for previous information.

The thing that makes Northern Voice great is the people. Last year, both the speakers and the attendees were incredible and I can’t wait to catch up with some of those folks again this year. I learned a lot, shared a lot and made some new friends and acquaintances.

Come talk to me about cleaning up your inbox with Boxbe’s social anti-spam tools or just to say hi.

Now, he wasn’t talking about Boxbe on Marketplace, but we love Mark so, we thought it was worth mentioning here.

The story, What ever happened to Netscape?, is on today’s episode Marketplace. Mark was quoted because he was around back then (ok, I was too, but Mark was actually working online) and worked at some places like Prodigy and Sony Online.

The story gives a history of Netscape which is intertwined pretty tightly with the history of the web. Netscape is largely gone, but lives on in the form of Firefox, the browser of choice for many of us today.

You’ll need Real Player to listen to the segment, but can download an MP3 of the whole show here. The story starts at about 13 minutes in.

Read

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.