An anti-spam service called Boxbe

in Interesting on Unrelated

Follow ups of an email that came to my dad’s inbox.

How it all started

So I found an email in my Dad’s inbox. My mom wanted me to check it out. I found this:

boxbe

I just thought that an anti-spam service at this day and age was unnecessary, as almost all email providers have anti-spam features.

In a nutshell, the way this anti-spam filter works is pretty simple. You include a bunch of contacts to a “Waiting List”, and if any emails come to your inbox, your email client will notify you. If any other email comes to your inbox, it will be transferred to another folder, called “Boxbe Waiting List”, and if you want to see how much spam it has blocked, you can check that folder.

So it isn’t much of an anti-spam service, it just lets you select the emails you prioritize, and shows you those emails accordingly.

I checked the Wikipedia page, and it seems that this service ended in 2012. That’s odd. How am I getting these emails, if the service itself ended in 2012?

Just out of curiosity, I looked at its Twitter Feed.

boxbe-twitter

Yes, the last time it tweeted was in 2009.

And, according to its Wikipedia page, it is supposed to have been acquired by another company.

But then, I can’t say how much of that is true.

I have seen this service to be working (as of 10th October, 2017) and I hope this article will sort it out for anybody wanting to use this as a source (the Wikipedia page has multiple problems with it).

Anyways, I only made this article because some people on Twitter complained to boxbe that they couldn’t delete their Boxbe account.

What I did

Therefore, I made a dummy AOL Mail account and a dummy ProtonMail account in order to perform a check on whether this was true.

boxbe_invites A part of the webapp no one likes (at least according to twitter).

boxbe_signup The sign-up notification.

Before After
boxbe_dashboard boxbe_after

The Main dashboard before and after disabling it.

And to check that it is truly not working anymore, I sent a test message through ProtonMail to the AOL Mail account I had registered boxbe with.

proton_mail

where_it_came

As you can see, it has appeared in the Spam Folder, something that all ProtonMail emails appear in AOL Mail. So we know for sure that Boxbe was truly removed.

And now, I can finally go back to learning CS.