Boxbe anti spam filter – a cure worse than the plague

To all my friends who received annoying marketing email messages from a miserable Silicon Valley internet startup called Boxbe: I beg your pardon.

After I signed up to Boxbe, more than 500 of my email contacts received annoying invitations, saying "I'm using Boxbe to screen my email and I've added you to my approved Guest List. Can you take a minute to make sure your contacts can reach me?". Many people have received this message already six times. Now I get emails back from buddies saying "could you please stop spamming me and my girlfriend? Boxbe sucks!".

All this happens only because I once hit the "invite friends" button at Boxbe. But have hit it only once and it was only by chance.

There is no reason for Boxbe to flood my friends with unsolicitated email messages. Most of them are Germans and don't even understand what Boxbe is. To them a Boxbe invitation is the same as an email from a Viagra pharmacy. My 73 years old aunt Gerda forwards all Boxbe messages to me and prays that I can take away this plague from her. My mum does the same. I then click the link at "If you would prefer not to receive any further invitations from Boxbe members, click here" and hope that helps.

What upsets me most: I was already aware that something like this could happen. The Canadian blogger Alec Saunders had published it under the title "Boxbe’s spam. A fatal mistake for them and me". Therefore I only "approved" my friends' email addresses at Boxbe and never "invited". Unfortunately one time I mixed it up and that's how it all started.

I have contacted now the Boxbe tech support (support@boxbe.com) as well as Boxbe Product Manager Randy Stewart (randy@boxbe-inc.com) to stop these annoying invitations. Boxbe, you can't sell yourself as an anti spam solution by being a spammer yourself!

If it wasn't for these stupid marketing messages, Boxbe would be one of the greatest solutions to keep up with the information overflow. It could keep my inbox clean from emails which are worse than Viagra spam: unsolicitated press releases and stupid advertsising messages. A doorkeeper for emails.

My problem is, that German law requires me to post a working email address in the contact section of my website. Another annoying fact is that PR agencies seem to sell my email address which I use for journalistic work. Therefore I get tons of messages to these addresses. Most of them are filtered as spam by an automatic solution. Only once a week I have to check for false positives, but the anti spam filter nearly never goes wrong.

But then there are marketing messages like the one I got from Dow Chemicals two days ago. Something is wrong with some crop, they said, and only pesticides from Dow can help, supposedly. WTF? Where did Dow get my email address from and why do they send this message? I am no peasant and as a journalist I am only interested in technology stuff, mostly when it's related to VoIP or mobile communications.

Boxbe would have put this message from Dow under a quarantine. Since it didn't come from an authorized contact, it would have had to wait at Boxbe before it could enter my real inbox. Messages from authorized contacts would go straight to my email inbox and are shown on my cell phone. All other messages have to wait in the outer office. Once a day Boxbe sends a summary of all these waiting messages and you can kill or authorize them with one click. Users of Yahoo Mail, Gmail or Outlook can have it even more comfortable.

"With Boxbe, your inbox is no longer a free-for-all", is the company's claim and I like this idea very much. By using the tool wisely and combining Boxbe with other technologies, your inbox would not only be free of spam about Viagra or penis enhancement. But you could also have a great fence against unrelated messages which slip through the spam filter but are unwanted anyway.

If only it wasn't for Boxbe's stupid bulk invitations!

I hope they will stop now. I have the feeling that Boxbe only sends them out when I make a change in my settings. Hopefully that's true! In this case I could give it another try.

In an other blog I found this alleviating comment from Boxbe:

randy@boxbe.com said...

Just a point of clarification here. We're not planning on sending invitations every week to users. Rather, if multiple Boxbe users invite the same person, we'll only send a maximum of two to that person in a given week.

Ideally, if multiple Boxbe users want to invite someone, we need to figure out how to send that person one invite from all those people combined.

We're still pretty new at the invite game, but hopefully we can work all the kinks out sooner rather than later.

Cheers,
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager

Hope that helps.

Markus in The Industry Standard and TMCnet

Yesterday was a very good day for my small blog. I got quoted in The Industry Standard, VentureBeat, TMCnet and the Voxeo blog with my findings about Hipsip and the free bridge from Skype to phone.

That feels good.

A free bridge from Skype to phone

Do you remember my blog post "A SIP address for Skype? Better the other way around!"? This mission has now been accomplished. As of yesterday you can call me on Skype and I will answer this call on my desk phone or cell phone using SIP VoIP telephony. As I always try to achieve, this is a totally free solution.

I have joined Voxeo's developer program for their Evolution application, a visual design tool for interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Part of the deal is that you get a strange phone number with a +990 country code. There is no country associated with this code and Skype users can call these numbers for free. My Skype account is now being forwarded over Voxeo to a SIP address from Gizmo Project which I manage on Voxalot to make use of it's call connection rules and voice mail.

Have a peek on my settings:

A better explanation can be found at the Voxeo support forum. I wonder what VOIPSA's Dan York would say. In January he started a discussion with his blog post "Skype says "No" to VoIP interoperability - *because customers aren't asking for it!* - Well, I am!". He is, by the way, working for Voxeo and this partly solution for his problem comes from his own company. So I guess he was always aware of this trick.

I am happy now that people can call me with Skype and I don't have to keep me computer running or buy a special Skype phone for this purpose. That's the reason why I nearly never used Skype. I don't like applications which keep me tied to my computer in order to receive messages or phone calls, like Skype or the MagicJack normally do. Let's see which other solutions I can develop with Voxeo. Their visual tool makes the design of VoiceXML fairly easy.

Finally an own country code for VoIP, as I always wanted

I feel quite visionary, now that Voxbone has announced their iNum service. That's a new initiative to make worldwide portable VoIP telephone numbers available under the new virtual country-code +883. VoIP News explains it very well under the emblematic title "Creating A Country Called VoIP":

The new VoIP country number is 883, the counterpart of the 44 one dials to reach the U.K. or the 81 one uses for Japan. Putting those three digits in front of an individual subscriber's number will produce what Voxbone calls an iNum, a portable, permanent global phone number. Calling the iNum will ring the Skype or other VoIP account to which it is registered, anywhere in the world. Only companies such as Inmarsat Global Ltd. had previously obtained country codes based on technology rather than geography.

Voxbone is dealing now with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and with phone companies to make the new number range accessible for cheap prices from every country. "The goal of iNum is assuring free connectivity for all the world's VoIP users, more low-cost connectivity between VoIP and the PSTN, and unique identifiers for VoIP users worldwide", says CEO Rodrigue Ullens. That's exactly what I advocated for in July 2007 under the title "A new number range for worldwide mobile telephony is missing" in this blog:

So I think that an entire new number range is missing for worldwide mobile telephony. The best thing would be a cheap interconnect to the ++882 or ++858 number range, or something similar. These are international codes that don't belong to any particular country, but to ENUM services. It would be great if people could call them from every country for local prices. So you would never have to change SIM card or number for travel. You just had a virtual number, similar to German 032 numbers which don't belong to a particular city but to VoIP.

OK, so +883 is planned for VoIP and I envisioned it for mobile telephony. But companies like Maxroam or United Mobile will surely find a way to make the new number range usable on cell phones and thus slash roaming prices for incoming calls. Be it with multi IMSI SIM cards, which can be local in several countries at a time, or as free call forward from a fixed line VoIP number as they do it today. After all it makes no difference if you have a number from Liechtenstein, Isle of Man, Iceland or a virtual country called +883 on your travel SIM. They are all weird.

Needless to say that I have directly signed up for iNum's public beta test which is scheduled to begin in June 2008. Let's hope that iNum has more success than the +878 initiative had six years ago or the Universal International Freephone Number (UIFN) with country code +800, which has also failed. "Without a strategy to get all the Telcos in the world to set up routing and tariffing for this number range, calls to this number range are going to go nowhere. The problem here is that they have very little incentive to do this", says a user at the VoIP user blog.

I keep my fingers crossed.