Boxbe Features – Personal Access Price
March 2nd, 2007 by Randy Stewart, Product ManagerThe 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.