Boxbe’s spam. A fatal mistake for them and me.
Every so often a company really blunders. Boxbe has done it in spades with their release over the weekend. It was obectionable the first time it sent email to everyone in my address book. And yes, I didn’t read the text closely enough to see that that was the case. I simply loaded my address book and assumed it was filtering incoming mail based on who I knew.
First it spammed my friends. Mea culpe. I should have read the directions.
This morning though, it spammed them again. My email box is jammed with people saying “can you make this thing stop”, “you gotta make this stop”, “I’m really pissed”. Twitter is burning up with Boxbe messages. And those are the people that care enough. I don’t know how many people have just added me to their spam list.
The worst part? There’s no way to opt-out of the service once you’ve signed up. I can’t tell it to stop. I can’t tell it to cancel my account. And I have no way of knowing when it will spam my friends again.
Talk about unfriendly. Talk about being held hostage. Talk about a massive, reputation damaging screw-up, both for the company and me.
I’ve got mail in to the product manager, Randy Stewart, as well as their press line. My next step is to escalate to their management team and board of directors. Email addresses were kindly provided on their web site.
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Sorry again for the problems. If it’s ok, I’d like to post my email response to you as a comment.
——————
My profuse apologies to you for sending so many invitations on your behalf. We’re pretty new to using an invitation system on our site and clearly we erred on the on the side of being too aggressive.
Just to explain a bit about what’s happening to you: Currently, we send a follow up email two days after the initial invitation goes out.
During registration, we coupled adding contacts and sending invitations to streamline the process. The idea was to make registration have fewer steps overall. Even though the page says we are going to send out invitations, your note shows we probably need separate pages for adding contacts and another for sending invitations.
We are taking steps today to correct these design flaws to insure something like what happened to you does not happen to other people.
First, we’re going to add an additional confirmation page to make it clearer that you will be sending invitations to friends.
Second, we’re exploring other ways to better explain our value to people and their inboxes while making our invitation system less aggressive.
We hope that these changes will make the site experience overall for others.
Do you have suggestions that could make this process better? We’re thinking of better ways to prioritize our invitation process and we’d really appreciate any feedback you could give.
Again, we’re really sorry for any distress we may have caused.
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager
randy@boxbe-inc.com
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Hi Randy,
Thanks for coming by and posting that. I’ve been caught on other stuff.
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:23 am
Alec,
For once being on a Mac was a benefit :-) Boxbe couldn’t scan my address list, nor does it work with the paid GMAIL hosted domain accounts. My “friends” were spared.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:56 am
Two emails from you, 6 from Pat Phelan and others from other friends. Bad.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:03 am
I’m glad I can live vicariously through you, especially with regards to technical adventures :-)
April 24th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Hi Alec,
Sorry for sending you the initial Boxbe invite that signed you up :(
I’ve also been getting the ‘2nd day’ invite please get me off this list emails from my 1300 or so Outlook contacts.
I think people are used to ignoring a ‘first email’ (though a few people did query me about ‘whats boxbe’ when i first sent them out the initial invite) but getting one 2 days later makes them think that they are on some continual spamming list.
I also have to comment that whilst Boxbe support has been fairly responsive to my initial comments when I asked how do people delete accounts…….that there has been no response.
Not that I’m ready to cancel my Boxbe account, for the moment after about 3-4 days it seems to be doing a really nice job of seperating all but self sent domain spam (eg someone purporting to be sending you an email from your own domain). Everything is is being nicely seperated out and although I’m reviewing the ‘boxbe isolation folder’ about 4 times a day I feel this will settle down to once a day soon.
Far better than the spam protection that comes with outlook/exchange.
So I’m thinking I might keep it…..though the jury’s still out, Will post more on http://www.collins.net.pr/blog once I make my final decision.
Cheers,
Dean
April 29th, 2008 at 1:31 am
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