Can Boxbe Overcome Email Overload?

Boxbe is a service that is supposed to help us overcome email overload. It only allows pre-authorized addresses to get into your inbox. Anyone who hasn’t already been authorized is put on a waiting list that you can check at your leisure.

How it Works

Standard email works as a completely open system. Even if you have a spam filter setup, the offending emails still have to be filtered by your mail system and some make it into your inbox anyway. The other issue you run into is perfectly valid messages ending up in your Spam folder. I don’t know about you, but I never check my spam filter so those messages are gone for good.

With Boxbe, you are putting a velvet rope in front of your inbox and you get to choose who is invited to the party. When you add your email account, Boxbe checks to see who you’ve allowed in previously and automatically authorizes them for you. This saves a lot of time in getting up and running. The Guest list changes based on your habits, so you don’t necessarily have to add each new individual that you want to receive mail from.

Boxbe prioritizes incoming messages, giving them a number from 1 to 10. A low number means the message is probably not spam. This ensures that messages you want to see don’t accidentally get locked away in your spam folder.

Courtesy Notices? No Thanks.

One thing that bothers me about Boxbe is the way it keeps trying to email my contacts. They are called Courtesy Notices. At every turn, they want to send some type of message to one or more of my contacts. When I imported 978 contacts from Gmail, they wanted to send each one a notice. When I added people as friends, they want to send a notice. Even after disabling all courtesy notices, they still want to email my contacts. For a service that is supposed to help cut down on email overload, they sure are hell-bent on sending emails on my behalf.

Conclusions

For most email services, adding someone to your contact list puts them on a white-list so that you will always get their messages. Boxbe’s mail screening sounds exactly like your average spam filter, except that you get to see what score each message got and you handle them manually. There is even an option to block high-scoring messages automatically, which would cause it to operate just like your average email account.

Even though most of the features could be duplicated using filters and a little common sense, I think Boxbe could be useful to people who are still scared to share their email address on the net. Those just getting into social media who don’t want to give up their real address, or maybe experienced users who want to publicly post their email, but don’t want the spam bots to get it.

Do you use Boxbe? How has it worked out for you? How do you have it set up?