If you don’t know what “Boxbe” is, you have nothing to worry about and you can ignore this post.

If you use Boxbe and you haven’t put the UN Job List’s e-mail on your guest list, chances are you will receive a note from me telling you that I deactivated your e-mail and that you will not receive the UN Job List E-mail Alert in the future.

Here is what you need to do in order to use the UN Job List e-mail alert together with Boxbe:

1. Make sure that you put the UN Job List’s e-mail on your Boxbe guest list
2. Please make sure you tell Boxbe to not send me any messages
3. That’s all it takes, you’re all set

A bit of background: “What’s wrong with Boxbe?”

Boxbe is a service that promises you to get rid of SPAM. All you need to do, is give it your e-mail password and let Boxbe do the magic. In my opinion, using any service like Boxbe is not a great idea and I will try to explain why. We all don’t like SPAM (and hosting the UN Job List gets me a lot of SPAM, trust me I really don’t like SPAM) and I’m all for anything that reduces my SPAM. But fighting SPAM by spamming all your friends is not a great idea in my book. Unfortunately that’s what is happening if you use Boxbe and are not carefully managing your guest list. The issues I observe are:

1. For every user that uses Boxbe I get a message requiring me to solve a CAPTCHA before the UN Job List e-mail alert is delivered to the user. The UN Job List has thousands of users. If I would start solving CAPTCHAs for every every alert my users want me to send, I would not do anything but solving CAPTCHAs (remember that I’m doing the UN Job List in my private spare time and don’t get paid for providing this public service)
2. The system Boxbe uses does not send real bounces and so I don’t know if my mails are reaching the recipient or not. My server resources are expensive and I have no reasons for sending messages that are not wanted. If you don’t need the UN Job List any longer, please click the link in the message I send and you will never hear from me again. If Boxbe prevents me from knowing if my messages are wanted, how I can make sure that only people who want my alerts receive them? I spend a lot of time sending my e-mail alerts. I also spend a considerable amount of time working on e-mail error messages and pride myself in keeping my newsletter very clean so that no message is wasted. So not only Boxbe wastes my resources by asking me to solve CAPTCHAs but also Boxbe wastes my resources by not telling me which messages are received or not.
3. Lastly, I think it is good practice to not trust anybody with your mailbox credentials. It’s bad enough that you need to trust your e-mail provider with your digital life but letting anybody, be it Boxbe, Facebook’s Friend finder, Twitter etc. into your e-mail account is not a great idea. Remember that your e-mail account is your life. Your bank, your taxes, your Facebook, Twitter and virtually all other services are setup using your e-mail. And most of these services offer to reset your password sending it to you via e-mail. Anybody who has access to your e-mail controls your digital life. See why I recommend to NEVER let any service have access to your e-mail account? (Just for the record: I would never imply that Boxbe, Facebook or any other service is not dealing well with your e-mail credentials but errors, hacker attacks and other things happened to pretty much every service that’s out there and the fewer people have access to your account, the better).

So what can you do to minimize the amount of SPAM you get?

There are many different ways and this blog is not the best place to list it all but the things below helped me to deal with the issue:

1. Don’t give out your e-mail unless you need to. It’s not a secret that most commercially driven sites use your e-mail for all kinds of advertisements etc.
2. Have an e-mail for the important things in life (e.g. the UN Job List e-mail alert) and a second e-mail for your “less important” things. Sometimes you need to give out an e-mail in order to download a program, sign-up to see information etc. Provide an e-mail address that you check every now and then and not daily. Any SPAM piling up in this mailbox is not going to bother you too much.
3. Have your e-mail be “complicated to guess”. Spammers “guess” your e-mail but going through a combination of [name]@[popular ISP]. Chances are that joe@[domain].com will get a lot of spam but aW2432JU4eai3w2er234@[domain].com will not get too much. However this is a balance you need to get right; keep your poor friends in mind who may need to remember you e-mail which is not that easy if it is a complicated and long word.
4. Advanced users: Use existing standards to deal with SPAM. If you have the means look into DKIM/SPF and other standard conform ways of dealing with SPAM. And if you host a server, reject the connection if you suspect SPAM to give legitimate senders a chance to check their bounces.

Alright, thanks for your attention and if you have questions or ideas on how to improve this post, please let me know in the comments below.