Boxbe, a company that lets consumers regain control of their incoming email, announced a social utility for email. Boxbe's free service gives the millions of users of Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail the ability to protect and ensure the delivery of messages from friends, family, co-workers and even entire domains, such as: amazon.com, americanexpress.com or yourfamilyname.com. According to a research report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half of email users say they have lost trust in email because of spam.

    With the release of Boxbe's new service, users of Yahoo! Mail, Outlook and Gmail can now create an 'email guest list', which ensures that they receive messages only from those people who matter to them. Boxbe is backed by leading investors: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the original investor in: Hotmail, Skype, Baidu, and Overture, among many others; and Esther Dyson, an influential commentator on the impact of emerging technologies and markets, and an investor in Flickr, Medstory, Brightmail and Postini.

    "Going beyond Email 2.0 Boxbe's guest list makes email more like instant messaging or social networking: People who want to reach you must first get your permission," said Thede Loder, co-founder and president of Boxbe. "Boxbe allows you to treat your friends' email with the respect it deserves, and reject any message that tries to invade your inbox without an invitation from you."

    "I invested in Boxbe because they have created an innovative service that makes email usable again. Consumers have always had to deal with inboxes that are clogged with irrelevant information. With Boxbe, now they can focus only on those emails which really matter, from those people who really matter to them," said Esther Dyson, Boxbe investor and board member.

    This process stops spammers and brings order back to email. Unverified messages are not arbitrarily blocked or deleted; they are simply held in a waiting list where they can be viewed or forwarded at anytime. Consumers can also choose which businesses can reach them by name or by category; they can specify with total privacy which marketers can reach them and what products they are interested in.

    Email is an essential tool that we use in all areas of our lives, personal and professional. Yet it has not kept pace with the way people communicate. Inboxes are filled with unwanted messages, making it hard to find the things you do want. Or sometimes important messages are marked as junk by an over zealous spam filter. When you first sign up, Boxbe's technology scans your existing email folders and address book to create a Guest List that includes all the people you've recently and frequently emailed.

    Boxbe ranks incoming messages from 1-10, and color codes them. The lower the number, the better the message. Green messages mean likely good, yellow means caution and red means bad. There is no need to sign up for yet another email account. Boxbe works with the most popular email services. We send messages from people you've approved directly to your existing inbox. In the same way that social networks require users to accept friends to share profiles and exchange messages, the Boxbe guest list allows users to control which messages can get through and which need permission.

Setting up a guest list is simple:  
    -  The system imports the addresses you already have saved and allows you to select those you want to accept messages from;
    -  anyone not on the guest list who sends you a message receives an invitation to join your guest list, and remains on a waiting list until you verify the message and approve the sender.

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