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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Boxbe, Trojan Horse Spam Machine


Sorry to everyone who got a Boxbe invitation from me. Boxbe is a "white-list" email program, that I got invitation to, and then it grabbed by address book and spammed others. Also it sends annoying reminders to them to be sure to sign up. Here is a story similar to mine.

Boxbe started in 2005, and it allows mail to pass between approved users, and this should block spam. A white list means that only people on this list can send you mail. Their original business model was to make spammers pay to get access to their email list.  This is sleezy in that clients want freedom from spam, but the plan was to auction their addresses off. Wikipedia says they are not doing this anymore, but the Boxbe site is less clear about that.

Recently, they started automatically spamming the address book of subscribers. I found the whole thing quite embarrassing, and I hope that I have succeeded in disengaging from them.

Thede Loder is one of the founders, and he is a  former PhD student at U Michigan Ann Arbor. The other founder, Corbett Barr, was a consultant. Both lived in San Francisco.


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1-October-2009: I got an reply for Boxbe, so be sure to click on the comments. I liked the fact that they are concerned about their reputation. That suggests they are trying to improve. 

1 comment:

  1. randy@boxbe.comOctober 1, 2009 at 6:15 PM

    sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with Boxbe.

    You are correct in saying that our original business model was to charge email marketers for access to user's inboxes (who had opted in). We gave 75% of that charge to the user and kept 25%. However, we turned this functionality off in 2008.

    We do ask members to invite their friends to use the service and we do send out Courtesy Notices to people that are not included in your Guest List. You can turn these Courtesy Notices off here - https://www.boxbe.com/courtesy-notices

    The reason we ask people to invite their friends is that Boxbe members who are friends share their white lists, which makes it easier to keep it up to date.

    Not sure about your comment "automatically spamming the address book of subscribers." Can you be more specific?

    Finally, the link above you gave to Saundersblog - Alec Saunders made a follow up to that post here - http://saunderslog.com/2008/04/24/boxbe-is-learning-fast-learn-from-them/

    as we changed how our system worked as a result of his feedback.

    Sorry again for any problems we may have caused.

    Cheers,
    Randy Stewart
    VP of Product, Boxbe

    ReplyDelete

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