For those of us who have been using email for many years, spam is a necessary evil. We deal with it as a consequence of having such a speedy digital communication system at our fingertips and manage it as well as we can by using a spam-filter and occasionally sifting through our spam folder to fish out the rare, wrongly-accused message.
Occasionally, though, I find myself wondering if there might be a better way to handle spam. I mean, my spam filter separates incoming messages into just two groups: genuine emails and unwanted solicitations. Spam (and life) is rarely so black and white. There are many degrees of spam. For instance, coupons from the bookstore that I frequent are more valuable to me than, say, random offers of outrageous wealth from foreign royalty. But unless I put my bookstore’s email addresses on my spam-filter’s whitelist, my spam-filter will treat them the same.
Most spam-filters simply can’t differentiate between what are good, opt-in email messages and what is spam, and while a “better-safe-than-sorry” attitude is fine for most people, some email users may be seeking another option. For those users, there is a solution to be found in Boxbe, though this recommendation comes with a few caveats.
How Boxbe Works
Boxbe is an email screening service that sorts and prioritizes incoming messages to help you “say goodbye to email overload”. The service is free and integrates directly with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and AOL Mail, but can be used with any existing email account (as long as you’re willing to log into Boxbe’s website to access certain functions). Boxbe doesn’t provide a stand-alone email account for you, but they do provide a Boxbe address that forwards to the account of your choosing.
Upon signing up, you’re asked to supply the email address and password of the webmail account with which you’ll be allowing Boxbe to integrate. An approved sender’s list – called the Guest List – is created using your webmail’s contacts and you’re given the option to send everyone in your contact list a message extolling the virtues of Boxbe and encouraging others to join. Boxbe then takes care of the rest of the set-up for you by creating a new label in your webmail account and setting a fairly tight security level.
Acting as an intermediary between the world and your inbox, whenever a message is sent to you, Boxbe checks your Guest List. If the sender is not on that list, Boxbe assigns the message a priority number from one to ten based on a “sophisticated scanning technology”. Boxbe then checks your defined priority threshold that dictates which priority numbers are allowed to arrive in your inbox, which should be held for approval on the Waiting List (an area of the Boxbe website where unknown senders who have completed a robot-proof test await your approval), and which messages it should outright block.
It should be noted that as late as early 2009, Boxbe allowed you to set up a price that potential spammers could pay to bypass your filter. The idea behind this is that the spammers would either stop spamming you, or they would fork over a few cents for every email they sent you, which would make you rich. The problem with this deal was that it nearly guaranteed that your email address would be sold by Boxbe to every spammer on the planet. As you can imagine, this didn’t work out very well. Boxbe began garnering a lot of negative attention from users who weren’t becoming rich, just getting spam more frequently, and they folded up that side of their service. The Boxbe we are left with today does not have this option available and all evidence that it once existed has been deleted from Boxbe’s website.
First Impression and Features
The Boxbe website is well-designed and presents the various settings webpages in a manner that is easy to understand and navigate. Your incoming messages to date can be seen in a graph, your five top senders for the week are listed, you can add and remove webmail accounts, and your Guest and Blocked List can be modified manually.
User Beware
Any website that asks for my webmail login information sends up a red-flag for me. I can understand why Boxbe requires this access to perform properly, but I am normally unwilling to share access to the website that I use to run both my work and personal life. For the purposes of this review, I made an exception, and it’s one that I regretted instantly.
After signing up for Boxbe and inputting my webmail login password, I was confronted with what appeared to be a list of my webmail contacts. I assumed that the page I was viewing was simply adding my contacts to the Guest List, until I took a second glance. My webmail contacts had already been added to the Guest List; this page wanted my approval to send an email “Invitation” to every single one of my 1,172 contacts. The opportunity to skip was located at the bottom of the page, which required some scrolling, in much smaller, plain text.
I am not the first person to nearly send what amounts to being a spam message, from a supposedly anti-spam service, to their entire address book. It’s a popular topic in the Boxbe forums (“Boxbe annoying my friends!”) and there is no way to reverse the setting once you’ve approved it; each user that you have opted-in to the Boxbe mailing list must opt-out themselves.
After avoiding this trap, I checked through all of my settings, which seemed reasonable. Then I checked my Gmail account. Suddenly I had dozens of spam messages flooding my inbox, from yesterday, from previous weeks, and a few from last month. It took me a moment to realize what was happening: Boxbe had gone through my spam folder, assigned priority numbers to all of the messages in there, and then had started pulling messages out of my spam and putting them back into my inbox, completely disregarding my previous webmail settings for that sender.
After recovering from the shock of this irony, I logged into Boxbe and changed my settings to what I thought would fix the problem. It helped stem the flow of messages from my spam folder to my inbox by about half, which I monitored over the next day. It took disconnecting my account completely to stop it entirely.
The Verdict
During the time between signing up for Boxbe and the moment I disconnected the service from my webmail account, I saw Boxbe doing what was promised. It sorted my incoming messages according to its in-house scanning method and, if I hadn’t already had a spam-filter in place and if it hadn’t pulled messages out of my spam folder, it would have uncluttered my inbox. The idea of sorting mail by priority is a good one, but Boxbe’s execution needs some work or, perhaps more accurately, a programming overhaul.
If you constantly have to look for wayward messages in your spam-filter and desperately need an alternative that gives you more control, it could be worth it to try Boxbe. Otherwise, stay away from this questionable service.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Email Marketing, Email Service Guide. Email Service Guide said: @Boxbe: Hinders More Than Helps http://bit.ly/8RpTW6 #boxbe [...]
What is really annoying of Boxbe is that it interferes even with the correspondence initiated by the user. Say somebody places an order at some site, they cannot even get an email confirming their order unless the site adds itself to their guest list (an automated system adding itself to any lists? come on!) On the other hand, Gmail’s spam filter works fine for me most of the time – except for a few rare glitches, I do not get any unsolicited spam and all the email that I expect to get mostly ends up in my inbox, not the spam folder.
Agreed. Gmail’s spam-filter works great and I very rarely have false-positives. I still like the idea of prioritizing incoming mail, though, and would like to think that there’s an email screening service somewhere out there that’s doing it right or will do it right in the future.