Boxbe Blog

Real quickly, we wanted to let you know about two cases that happened recently.  Which, by themselves, would’ve caused issues but combined, took things up a notch.

First, our support queue, which you all depend on to write in with questions, suggestions, and issues, had a email routing issue which prevented email from being directed into the support queue.  It was piling up, not being lost, but not being placed in the queue for support response.  That issue has been fixed and we received all the support emails and are working through them as quickly as possible.

Second, some of you may have noticed that Boxbe wasn’t scrubbing your email inbox.  The screening of certain Gmail, AOLMail, and Yahoo! Mail email addresses was disabled due to some of our systems not correctly representing what they had a handle on.  We have a temporary fix in place, and our engineers are looking into implementing a permanent remedy so this doesn’t happen again.  We will let you know when it’s done.

We will continue to diligently monitor our service.  Thank you for your continued use and support of Boxbe!

Please write to support@boxbe.com if you require any assistance for any Boxbe service issues.

Boxbe is keeping up with the latest in security practices and is excited to announce our support of OAUTH with Gmail and Google Apps. This means that when using Boxbe to help prioritize your email, you can exchange email account authentication information with Boxbe (such as your email contact list) without sharing any access permissions (your password).

What has changed with Boxbe, you ask?

First-time users, and users setting up more than one Gmail and/or Google Apps email address in their Boxbe account, previously needed to input their username and password in the Boxbe system. Now, when going through either of the same processes, you will automatically be directed to Gmail to enter your information, and then sent back to Boxbe after accepting to grant OAUTH access to Boxbe.

What are the Benefits?

Your email’s personal access information is not given out.  At all.  Boxbe can only access your data when you have given your consent.

More details: Click on this link for more information on OAUTH from Google.

Boxbe continuously aims to support the best practices, especially when it comes to the security of our members.  We take the privacy of our members seriously, while recognizing that doing so is critical to the success of using the Boxbe service.  As with OAUTH, Boxbe continues to make significant efforts to protect the identity and personal information of our members.  Securely maintaining Access Permissions using industry standard security practices, and seeking the best ways to improve integration with ISP’s (internet service providers) for the sake of security, is our goal.

Note for Gmail OAUTH users: You can always edit any third party applications you have allowed to access your Google account, by visiting your Google account Dashboard.  Under “Account” click on “Websites authorized to access account” and you will be taken to a page with a list of connected sites, apps, and services.

For more information on Boxbe, Click here to see how Boxbe works!

And coming in the not-so-distant future: Boxbe OAUTH support for AOL and
Yahoo! Stay tuned…

To our valued Boxbe for Gmail members,

As proponents of good online security practices, Boxbe is happy to announce basic support of Google’s Advanced Sign-In (click here for Google’s announcement).   If you are not familiar with Google’s multi-factor (2-step) authentication and support for per-application passwords, you can read more about it here.

Or watch the video below.

Using Advanced Sign-in with Boxbe

Essentially, when you enable 2-step verification for your Google account, Google effectively disables (blocks) all third-party apps including those that use IMAP (Boxbe uses IMAP).  To re-enable access for a third-party application such as Boxbe, you must explicitly generate a password using Google’s own special password generator and then provide that password to the application (to Boxbe).

You may wish to view the video referenced above (and here again) for additional explanation.

Step by Step Instructions  

If you have enrolled in 2-step verification, you should:

1)   Go to Google’s setup 2-step verification page (opens in new window).  Once setup for 2-step verification, you will need to generate a password.

2)   You should then be taken to Google’s authorizing applications & sites page to generate a password for use with Boxbe.  Save this password.

3)   Navigate to the Boxbe Email Enrollment Status Page and log in (opens in new window).

4)   For your Gmail account to be reset in Boxbe you will need to re-establish the link by clicking on “disable” first (next to the email you are enrolling in 2-step verification).  Once the email is visible in the Other Addresses section, click on “enable”…  You will be prompted to enter your password.

5)   Enter the newly generated Google password into the password field (please note that this is not the field to your Boxbe account).

6)   When this is complete, you will no longer need to enter the generated password, as it is a one-time process.

And congratulations: You’re Done!

Note: To turn off 2-step verification, instructions by Google are provided here.

Please write to support@boxbe.com if you require any assistance for any Boxbe service issues.

Boxbe, in collaboration with Yahoo!, has expunged the Waiting List message layout issue!  Click here for original issue announcement.

Yahoo! account waiting lists are now back in top working order.  We thank you for your patience and immutable user-ship!

Due to a display problem introduced in a recent Yahoo upgrade, you may have discovered that messages in your Waiting List are showing up a little strange looking…see sample picture for reference.  The body of the message is showing up twice and the convenience links that Boxbe provides are not in the place they should be.

Along with Yahoo!, we are pursuing a fix for this bug at this very moment. We thank you for your patience as we enjoy tackling the intruding gremlin.

Some of you may have noticed that the relevance ranking which Boxbe assigns to messages from unapproved senders (sometimes called a “spam score”, or the 1-10 ranking) is not as accurate or consistent as before.  This is because this feature is now partially disabled.

Within the next month or so Boxbe will remove this feature completely. The reason we are removing message rankings is that the mainstream ISPs (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo!) have become much better at correctly placing email in the Inbox or the Spam folder.  In addition, computing the relevance score is an expensive operation for Boxbe to perform, so it makes sense to rely upon the ISPs good work.

Not to worry, we will still be analyzing each of your messages and considering your preference settings when deciding what to do with them.

* FYI we’re excited! – In future months, we’ll be focusing our development efforts in some new areas and we look forward to sharing them with you as they happen!

Have Questions?  Check this out…

Boxbe provides a great deal of user help and support.  From our FAQ list and How It Works page, to our user-control panels and our Blog you are currently reading!

We also provide a technical support email for any personal issues, comments or suggestions that might arise: support@boxbe.com.

Some Boxbe insight can also be found in following video:

Our Friends of Friends/Contacts of Friends feature has been disabled for the time being.  Boxbe has been named a defendant in a patent suit, and while we do not believe the patent to be valid or that Boxbe’s service infringes, we have in good faith disabled this feature.  Sometimes great ideas are taken, to be protected under law, keeping those others who think of them from being able to use them.

We understand this may be a little unsettling to those of you who found the feature to be particularly useful, but “grieve not you; you who are welcome notwithstanding”; Boxbe’s superb system is still robustly distinctive!  And our user community continues to grow vigorously.

Shakespeare, William.  The Merchant of Venice.  V. I. 216-262.

Boxbe will experience a bit of downtime tomorrow, September 30, 2009, as we need to upgrade our servers to increase capacity.

We’ve experienced unprecedented growth over the last six months as more people have joined Boxbe than ever before. Additionally, we’ve noted an increase in unwanted email and spam, which we diligently remove from your inbox. We’ll be better able to handle all of our new users and email volume after our upgrades.

We anticipate that this downtime will take most of the day, starting at around 10am PDT. You do not need to do anything. Our service will resume as soon as our servers are back online. Additionally, when Boxbe comes back up, we will process the mail that we missed while we were down.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for using Boxbe.

Here’s a little video we did to better describe how Boxbe can help you say goodbye to email overload. Please share it with your friends!

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

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to everyone who has been using Boxbe over the last year. The blog has been quiet for a while, but I wanted to let you know we’ve got some exciting announcements coming soon.

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 you 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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 are still experiencing a service outage for a number of our members and are still working with Yahoo! Mail to fix the problem.

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.

On Friday, we experienced a service outage for some of our Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail users that is still affecting users today. While the service is still working for most, an issue with the Yahoo! Mail API is preventing us from reinstating service completely.

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.

We’ve been busy here at Boxbe HQ making improvements to our service to make Boxbe easier to use and better integrated into your email workflow.

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.

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.

As we’re winding down for a 4th of July here in the US, it seemed like a good time to mention some of the recent articles written about us. Here are a few recent mentions that Boxbe has had in the blogosphere and by Fox Business News and the gray lady.

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

Update 2:13 PM We are back up. Sorry for any inconvenience.

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

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

Last night we had a service outage for our Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail service. After diagnosing the problem with the good folks down at Yahoo!, we have fixed the issues that caused the outage.

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.

Update 3: 3:40 PM May 6, 2008
We’re back!!

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.

Read the rest of this entry »