 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2019) |
| Founded | 2005 |
|---|---|
| Founders | Thede Loder Corbett Barr |
| Website | boxbe |
Boxbe is a free service that prioritizes and screens spam in personal email. Users can select which email they want to receive, and which email goes to spam. It presents a challenge to the sender that requires a human response. [1] [ how? ] Bulk anonymous data is provided to their parent company, which provides an email validation and tracking service. [2] [3]
Boxbe starts with the user allowing Boxbe access to all of the user's email contacts. Boxbe then gives priority to contacts that users allow. Integration within Gmail (including Google Apps), AOL, Yahoo! Mail and their affiliates lets Boxbe stay up to date so it can screen email. [1]
Boxbe was founded in 2005 by Thede Loder and Corbett Barr. Venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson were both investors, with Dyson and Steve Jurvetson serving as board members. [4] As a way to filter spam beyond challenge response, Boxbe initially used the option of allowing recipients to define a price that senders must risk to deliver the initial message (paying a fee to deliver the email, which they called the Attention Bond Mechanism), [5] which they later abandoned. Boxbe company founder Thede Loder along with Marshall Van Alstyne and Rick Wash wrote the initial paper on Attention Bond Mechanism. [6] [7] [8] Technically capable users can assemble many of these functions, such as whitelisting. [9]
In 2012, eDataSource, Inc. purchased the assets of Boxbe, Inc. [10]
Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying, and typically submit outgoing email to the mail server on port 587 or 465 per RFC 8314. For retrieving messages, IMAP is standard, but proprietary servers also often implement proprietary protocols, e.g., Exchange ActiveSync.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method which ensures the sending mail server is authorized to originate mail from the email sender's domain. This authentication only applies to the email sender listed in the "envelope from" field during the initial SMTP connection. If the email is bounced, a message is sent to this address, and for downstream transmission it typically appears in the "Return-Path" header. To authenticate the email address which is actually visible to recipients on the "To:" line, other technologies such as DMARC must be used. Forgery of this address is known as email spoofing, and is often used in phishing and email spam.
Greylisting is a method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will try again after a delay, and if sufficient time has elapsed, the email will be accepted.
A bounce message or just "bounce" is an automated message from an email system, informing the sender of a previous message that the message has not been delivered. The original message is said to have "bounced".
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
A message submission agent (MSA), or mail submission agent, is a computer program or software agent that receives electronic mail messages from a mail user agent (MUA) and cooperates with a mail transfer agent (MTA) for delivery of the mail. It uses ESMTP, a variant of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), as specified in RFC 6409.
Disposable email addressing, also known as DEA or dark mail or "masked" email, refers to an approach which involves a unique email address being used for every contact, entity, or for a limited number of times or uses. The benefit is that if anyone compromises the address or utilizes it in connection with email abuse, the address owner can easily cancel it without affecting any of their other contacts.
Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
Emailtracking is a method for monitoring whether the email messages is read by the intended recipient. Most tracking technologies use some form of digitally time-stamped record to reveal the exact time and date that an email was received or opened, as well as the IP address of the recipient.
Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed, but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.
A challenge–response system is a type of spam filter that automatically sends a reply with a challenge to the (alleged) sender of an incoming e-mail. It was originally designed in 1997 by Stan Weatherby, and was called Email Verification. In this reply, the purported sender is asked to perform some action to assure delivery of the original message, which would otherwise not be delivered. The action to perform typically takes relatively little effort to do once, but great effort to perform in large numbers. This effectively filters out spammers. Challenge–response systems only need to send challenges to unknown senders. Senders that have previously performed the challenging action, or who have previously been sent e-mail(s) to, would be automatically whitelisted.
Email forwarding generically refers to the operation of re-sending an email message delivered to one email address to one or more different email addresses.
An email alias is simply a forwarding email address. The term alias expansion is sometimes used to indicate a specific mode of email forwarding, thereby implying a more generic meaning of the term email alias as an address that is forwarded in a simplistic fashion.
People tend to be much less bothered by spam slipping through filters into their mail box, than having desired e-mail ("ham") blocked. Trying to balance false negatives vs false positives is critical for a successful anti-spam system. As servers are not able to block all spam there are some tools for individual users to help control over this balance.
A cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact. It could also be defined as the email equivalent of cold calling. Cold emailing is a subset of email marketing and differs from transactional and warm emailing.