Boxbe Blog

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.

Need help getting up to speed on Gmail? This video from Ask the PC Guide can help.

The video covers creating labels, filters, shortcuts, managing multiple email accounts and more.

Remember, you can use Boxbe for your Gmail account by signing up here.

[Video via Lifehacker]

Feature: Getting Things Done with labels and filters in Gmail 2.0 – Geek.com
Joel Evans over at Geek.com details how to use the new features of Gmail to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) system with Gmail.

New URL features can make your e-mail productive again – Ars Technica
New linking feature in Mac OS X Mail and in Gmail documented by Ars Technica and John Gruber.

Easily Transfer Emails from Hotmail to Gmail Via Outlook Connector – Digital Inspiration Technology Guide
How to move your Hotmail email to Gmail via Outlook.

Gmail Tip: Import Messages into Gmail via IMAP – Dracoware
"Here’s a quick overview of how to get all of your old emails into Gmail as painlessly as possible (and one way that preserves dates!)."

image by Flickr user zenera

NOTE: Boxbe is discontinuing support for removing Boxbe for Gmail in this way. Please follow the directions at the bottom of this post to remove Boxbe for Gmail.

Edited February 4, 2008

Recently, we’ve had a little bug that made it difficult to remove Boxbe protection from Gmail accounts. The bug has been fixed, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell everyone how to disable Boxbe for your email account (particularly Gmail). We know some people may want to discontinue service after trying it and we’ve made it easy to enable and disable accounts.

How it works

We’ve added a filter to Gmail to selectively forward email to Boxbe and send email from senders on your Guest List back to Gmail. You can turn this on and off on the site by going to the Boxbe Dashboard and click “Disable” next to the email address you want to disable (this works with the other addresses, too).

Next, you’ll be taken to a screen that you’ll have to enter in your Gmail password.

If for some reason, that doesn’t work, click through to the next page to get the details on how to turn Boxbe for Gmail off in Gmail.

To turn off Boxbe for Gmail manually, follow these steps.

First, go to your settings from within Gmail.

Second, once inside your Gmail Settings, click “Filters.”

Finally, find the Boxbe filter (this will be the one that says “Do this: Forward to username@boxbe.com, Skip Inbox, Delete it”

Once you’ve removed the filter, Boxbe won’t be protecting your Gmail account anymore.

You can always re-enable the account on your Boxbe Dashboard.

Email nods to social networking with ‘Email by invitation’

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – November 29, 2007: Boxbe, a company that lets consumers regain control of their incoming email, today announced a social utility for email. Boxbe’s free service gives the millions of users of Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail the ability to protect and ensure the delivery of messages from friends, family, co-workers and even entire domains, such as: amazon.com, americanexpress.com or yourfamilyname.com. With the release of Boxbe’s new service, users of Yahoo! Mail, Outlook and Gmail can now create an ‘email guest list’, which ensures that they receive messages only from those people who matter to them.

“Going beyond Email 2.0 Boxbe’s guest list makes email more like instant messaging or social networking: People who want to reach you must first get your permission,” said Thede Loder, co-founder and president of Boxbe. “Boxbe allows you to treat your friends’ email with the respect it deserves, and reject any message that tries to invade your inbox without an invitation from you.”

In the same way that social networks require users to accept friends to share profiles and exchange messages, the Boxbe guest list allows users to control which messages can get through and which need permission. Setting up a guest list is simple:

• The system imports the addresses you already have saved and allows you to select those you want to accept messages from
• anyone not on the guest list who sends you a message receives an invitation to join your guest list, and remains on a waiting list until you verify the message and approve the sender.

This process stops spammers and brings order back to email. Unverified messages are not arbitrarily blocked or deleted; they are simply held in a waiting list where they can be viewed or forwarded at anytime. Consumers can also choose which businesses can reach them by name or by category; they can specify with total privacy which marketers can reach them and what products they are interested in.

According to a research report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half of email users (55 percent) say they have lost trust in email because of spam.

“Email is such an essential tool we use in all areas of our lives, personal and professional, yet it has not kept pace with the way that people communicate these days,” continued Loder. “We are committed to working with companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google to restore people’s faith in email by screening out unwanted messages and letting in those that matter.”

Boxbe is able to offer this innovative service in part due to the “opening-up” of some of the industry’s leading e-mail services. For example, in March 2007, Yahoo! announced the opening of its Yahoo! Mail Web Services, a multi-tiered set of open Web services that allow developers to build software and services around the world’s No. 1 Web mail platform.

“I invested in Boxbe because they have created an innovative service that makes email usable again. Consumers have always had to deal with inboxes that are clogged with irrelevant information. With Boxbe, now they can focus only on those emails which really matter, from those people who really matter to them,” said Esther Dyson, Boxbe investor and board member.

Boxbe is backed by leading investors: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the original investor in: Hotmail (acquired by MSFT), Skype (acquired by EBAY), Baidu (BIDU), and Overture (acquired by YHOO), among many others; and Esther Dyson, an influential commentator on the impact of emerging technologies and markets, and an investor in Flickr (acquired by Yahoo!), Medstory (acquired by Microsoft), Brightmail (acquired by Symantec) and Postini (acquired by Google).

About Boxbe
Boxbe lets you easily create an email guest list that ensures you receive messages from people and companies that matter to you. Boxbe is completely free, and takes only a few minutes to set up. Boxbe’s free service works with most popular email products and services, including Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. Boxbe is a privately held company, headquartered in San Francisco, CA and online at: www.boxbe.com.

Media inquiries
Andrea Heuer
Consort Partners
boxbe@consortpartners.com
Tel: +1 (917) 886-5113

News is coming in from all over the web about Google’s Gmail launching IMAP support for their email service.

What’s IMAP?

Gmail is the first major email service to support the IMAP protocol which is a good way to keep track of email in multiple ways. Every email that you send, receive or move into a different folder all remain on a server. This means you can use Outlook on your PC at work, OS X mail at home and Gmail on your mobile phone and all applications would stay in sync.

Boxbe for Gmail

We expect the Boxbe for Gmail service will continue to work as it currently does, even if you enable IMAP for Gmail. If you experience any service problems, please let us know.

Read

Like being too rich or too thin, in the world of email, you can never have “enough” storage. Or so our pals at Google and Hotmail are telling us.

Coming on the heels of Yahoo’s unlimited storage announcement, these announcements seem sort of silly. However, no one really seems to know what “unlimited” really means. I’m sure that users of Hotmail and Gmail will be happy with these upgrades.

Google Storage

Google is now offering paid upgrades for both Gmail and Picasa.

• 6 GB for $20 a year
• 25 GB for $75.00 a year
• 100 GB for $250 a year
• 250 GB for $500 a year

While on the pricey side, if you are a user of these services (especially Picasa) having storage like this is certainly worthwhile.

While I’m an avid Flickr user, having a backed up version of my photos online is invaluable.

Read

Hotmail Upgrades

Hotmail has joined the free upgrade party by offering 5 GB of storage for free on their service, bringing them into the number two spot for overall free storage space.

Hotmail has been evolving as it is rolled into the Microsoft’s Windows Live initiative. With lots of new features (which we’ve talked about in the past) and new storage capacity, Hotmail is looking better and better.

Read

Friend of emailers everywhere, Merlin Mann has been an organizational hero of mine. Inbox Zero” is a concept Merlin pioneered (with a little help from GTD) and it is “an action based” strategy keeps your inbox free of all emails and creates a methodology for keeping your email centric life sane.

Sound good? Maybe a little scary? You can read more about Merlin’s system over on his blog, 43 Folders.

Embedded below is a talk Merlin did recently at Google talking about Inbox Zero. The video is about an hour, but is chock full of great advice. And, the title of this post will become more clear when you watch the video.

Ok, I admit it. We love the Google around Boxbe HQ. Here’s our latest collection of Gmail tips from around the web. Sit back, relax and let the knowledge flow in.

Hack Attack: Back up your Google Apps data – Lifehacker
The power outage that took out a lot of our favorite sites on Tuesday (Craigslist, Netflix, Vox, LiveJournal and others), serves as a little reminder to all of us that putting all of our data in the cloud doesn’t preclude you from backing up those files. While Google wasn’t one of the sites that went down, there are a number of reasons to have backups of your most important work.

How do I create a mail merge in Gmail? – Ask MetaFilter
The Ask Metafilter gang pile on the answers to mailing a lot of people in Gmail.

Hack Attack: Become a Gmail master – Lifehacker
Lifehacker writer Adam Pash has put together a nice hefty post (with video) to take you from n00b to l33t Gmail user. He covers labels, filters, keyboard shortcuts and a lot more.

Top Ten Gmail Tweaks – Trendplex
Steven Price over on Trendplex goes crazy with Greasemonkey and Firefox. The post details out his favorite tweaks to Gmail including macros, colors, Gcal and more.

We’re big fans of the Firefox Better Gmail plugin Gina and the gang at Lifehacker have been working on. The Better Gmail plugin cleans up Gmail’s interface, adds functionality and makes Gmail more adaptable to your individual needs.

The “official” 1.0 release dropped today and adds the following new features:

• Nested folders
• Tools menu direct access
• Google Apps compatibility

I’m particularly stoked as a Google Apps user to get functionality spread to my domain as well.

Congrats, Lifehacker, on your 1.0 release.

Read more

We haven’t had too many email tips of late, but the blogosphere has plenty to hand out. I’ve collected some of the best.

How to Use Gmail over IMAP – Download Squad
It’s a bit tricky, but nevertheless, David Chartier over at Download Squad has instructions on how to set up Gmail to work over IMAP. Now, you will need another IMAP account somewhere else to make this work, but hey, if you love IMAP and Gmail, these are two great tastes that taste… well, you know.

How to write a 5 sentence email – Guy Kawasaki
Now, you know we love Guy Kawasaki and all his great advice so when he talks about the ten things you should learn in school, we take note. Number nine in particular caught my eye (and Merlin Mann, too), which was “How to write a five-sentence email.”

One final geek tip for today.

Move Outlook email to Mail.app – MacOSXHints.com
Any switchers out there? I know I’ve had to move email from Outlook to the Mac in the past and let me tell you, it’s not easy. If you’re handy with the Terminal, this tip is for you.

photo by Flickr user Nrbelex

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

Tim Ferris over at the Huffington Post posted a video as well as some tips from Robert Scoble about how to deal with 10,000 or more messages a day. Man… now, there’s email overload.

Robert’s tips center around Microsoft Outlook which he has been using since 1990 and include

• Keeping all Outlook .PST files under 2GB in size to optimize speed and prevent crashes.
• Removing infrequently used .PST files.
• Renaming or appending frequently-used folders to appear at the top of the list.
• Responding to fewer e-mail is the holy grail.

We’d love to help you with your email overload problem, Robert. We’ll talk soon about some work we’re doing with Outlook.

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

As we head into the long weekend (in the US, anyway), here are some last email tips to ponder in traffic going to your favorite vacation spot. Summer is here and you need email efficiency more than ever.

Have a happy and safe Memorial Day from all of us here at Boxbe.

10 ways to get a grip on your e-mail – Fortune Magazine
Authors of the new book The Hamster Revolution: Stop Info-Glut and Reclaim Your Life!, offer up ways to get through email and change the way you look at time spent looking at email.

Is a one word “thanks” email unnecessary? – Lifehacker
Lifehacker readers debate the finer points of whether or not to send a one word email response “thanks” to people who you would thank face to face in real life. Email etiquette is ever changing amorphous beast. Personally, as a someone who works remotely, this is the only way I have to thank most people, so I’m all for it, your mileage may vary.

How to crank through your Gmail – Web Worker Daily
Leo Babauta over at Web Worker Daily gives us some hands on tips and tricks for getting through your email account Gmail-style. Keyboard shortcuts, filter suggestions and more await you on the other side of this link.

Finally, a follow up to a link we gave you last month.

E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’ – Washington Post
Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post reports on Fred Wilson’s email bankruptcy post last month. Fred gave his inbox the heave-ho by blogging an apology to all the unanswered emails in his inbox to start fresh. Memorial Day might just be the time to send out that email to start over with your email.

Iwo Jima image from Flickr user bootbearwdc

Eric Rice and Robert Scoble, a couple of bloggers who would benefit from using Boxbe.

I’ve been blogging for almost two years now and I love to hear from readers. Comments are a great place for people to continue the conversation, but often I’d like to take some conversations offline.

Most people don’t want to post their email address on their blog for fear of spam. If you do post your email address on your blog, that fear is realized.

I’ve seen lots of ways people get around not posting their actual email address like typing out “randy at boxbe dot com” or “randy at the URL you see above.” Worse, you might have a form that people can fill out to reach you, which doesn’t really make readers feel all warm and fuzzy when they want to reach you.

If you want to reach me, here’s a good old fashioned “mailto:” link – randy@boxbe.com.

I can post this email address anywhere I’d like:

• blogs,
• forums,
• comments,
• Twitter,
• or anywhere I’d want someone to be able to reach me later.

Here’s how it works

When people I haven’t pre-approved email me for the first time, they have to prove they are not an automated sender. I don’t think that is too much to ask. If they are a real person, I approve them to send me more emails by clicking “Approve” right in the message. I’m pretty friendly like that.

Use Gmail?

If you use Gmail, we’ve got you covered. With our Gmail integration, we’ve made it even easier to get a clean email inbox. Go here, plug in your Gmail address, click the button and you’re done.

Why use Boxbe?

Bloggers need to talk to their adoring fans and blogging isn’t a one way street. Blogging is about conversation. Many of those conversations can occur within or amongst blogs, but not everyone wants their opinion, question, or letters of love and devotion to be part of the public domain.

You want to put your email in a public place but you don’t want to be buried in spam. Boxbe can help you do that.

Yahoo Mail unlimited rolling out
As mentioned back in March, Yahoo! Mail has started rolling out its unlimited storage this week. Our friends at Mashable are encouraging us to test what “unlimited” means.

Google Gmail: Hot, hip or 3rd place?
Donna Bogatin over at ZDNet talks about Gmail and it’s users. Recent studies have shown Gmail to be the third most popular email service, but it is used by the young and wealthy.

Pros and cons of web-based mail
J D Biersdorfer of the New York Times debates the finer points of using email on the web versus a desktop client. We love email of all kinds here at Boxbe.

Image spam by the numbers
Informative article (although formatted in a bewildering way) about the methods used by image spammers. [via Slashdot]

Completely unrelated image by Flickr user eva101.

Shortcuts for Special Gmail Labels
Over at the Google Operating System blog, Ionut Alex Chitu details how to use Gmail’s labeling system’s undocumented shortcuts. “In Gmail every built-in view (e.g.: inbox, trash, read mail) is actually a label. So if you want to view all the unread messages from the inbox, you could search for: label:inbox label:unread.” [via Lifehacker]

Rich HTML email signatures straight from Gmail
Derek Punsalan shows how to get rich text into Gmail signatures. While it does require Firefox and the Better Gmail extension, we know you’re already using those anyway.

Add Outlook to your Google homepage
Our friends at Lifehacker show off how to get your Outlook mail to show up on your iGoogle personalized home page. This gadget does require you to use Windows XP and IE (or a slightly hacked version of Firefox). Very cool indeed.

NOTE:Boxbe is discontinuing support for adding a Gmail account in this way.

Edited February 4, 2008

We’ve just made integrating Boxbe with Gmail a heck of a lot simpler. I had planned to put a screen shot here, but it’s so easy, it seemed like a waste of bandwidth :-).

Starting today, we’ve enabled single click Gmail installation from your account home page. We’ve taken all the steps involved and reduced them to them to a few fields and a button.

Gmail integration is accessible directly here and is permanently accessible from your account home page.

What this does

We posted back in March about a method to set up Gmail to redirect email into Boxbe’s filter as well as setting up a signature to ensure redelivery of messages. The only thing we’ve changed is that we have automated the process for you.

Existing Members

If you are an existing member and you already use Gmail forwarding, you do not need to make any changes. We have automated the work you’ve already done.

If you were eager to see the changes we’ve made and already clicked the button, no worries. You will merely overwrite the changes you made previously, but the filter should still work.

Use Boxbe with Gmail

If you haven’t integrated Boxbe filtering for your Gmail account yet, we hope this makes it much easier.

Note to Gtalk users:
We’ve discovered a bug where Gtalk chats are not logged in your communications history. Existing conversations will not be affected. We hope to have this remedied soon.
[edited: Friday, May 11, 2007]

We have fixed the issue and we will push a fix out as soon as possible.
Monday, May 14, 2007

The issue has been resolved
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

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.