So, despite having worked at Boxbe for some time, I’ve not had the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. That is to say, I had not yet used Boxbe for my main email account.
I’ve had the email address randy_stewart@yahoo.com for six years, ever since I left the company. As a result, the email address has been “well used.” I’ve given it out to every website I’ve joined, every online merchant I’ve purchased a product from and essentially, I’ve given it to everyone I’ve met.
As a result, I was a little scared to turn Boxbe on this account in particular.
A little scary
Setting up a forwarding address randy@boxbe.com is fairly painless. I switched over to using randy@boxbe.com to anywhere I wasn’t comfortable giving out a “real” email address for fear of bacn at best and spam at worst.
When it came time to test Gmail, it was pretty painless. I had signed up for an account years ago, but the costs of switching to a new address are pretty high, so I didn’t really give it out. Plus, I could pull in all the email I received to Mac OS X Mail and not worry about ever going to the Gmail interface.
I knew the real test would be turning it onto my Yahoo! account. I had been a bit nervous, I mean, it’s my main email account. What would people think if they emailed me and got a “courtesy notice” that they had to respond to reach me?
What did they think?
Most people, it seems, don’t mind. New friends or acquaintances, took the captcha without even mentioning it to me. Old friends that change their email every six months (you know who you are), had to jump through some hoops, but no complaints there either. To be fair, my address book and my list of “approved senders” is fairly up to date, so the pain of proving their humanity was felt by few.
It seems in the day and age of Facebook and social networking in general, I think people are little more accustomed to there being some process involved the first time you communicate with someone. I think that email by invitation may have legs.
We’re all facing overwhelming spam problems and problems with attention in general. Personally, I don’t have a lot of spare time in my life, so the last thing I want to do is spend time clicking delete to get rid of spam or messages from “legitimate” marketers or other people I couldn’t care less about hearing from.
Results?
I’m happy to report that since I’ve been testing our product on Yahoo! Mail in the last week, I’m pretty excited about how well it’s working. No one is mad at me, I haven’t missed any important emails, I’m not dealing with spam that made it past Yahoo!’s filters, but best of all, I’m not missing any messages that may have erroneously marked as spam by an overzealous spam filter.
I’ll let you know when we’re out of our private beta and releasing it to a wider audience. Here’s a first, though, if you want to reach me, email me at randy_stewart@yahoo.com
Now, what to do about my bacn problem.
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Dale Dougherty over on 
