Boxbe: Yet Another “Sender Pays to Get Into Your Inbox” Email Model   - 5,113 Views, 3 Comments

Ho hum. It looks like yet another company has decided to try to make the “sender pays to get into your inbox” model work. Last time it was Affini, this time it’s Boxbe, and there have probably been countless others in between.

But it all boils down to one thing:

It ain’t gonna work.

In this particular model, you sign up for a free Boxbe account, and you set up a whitelist for all of your friends and family and anyone else you want to be able to reach you for free. Then everybody else has to pay to get an email into your inbox.

Personal contacts pay one price (your personal contact price). But others can buy their way into your inbox too - they just have to be willing to pay more. 33% plus 2 cents more than your personal contact price, to be specific. Or, they can “take an online test” - no word yet on what that “online test” is, but it’s likely to be some flavour of captcha.

Let me clarify here - email senders can buy their way into your Boxbe inbox even if they don’t know you. Because they can access your profile for free, and then purchase their way into your inbox.

So ok, yes, Boxbe is a bit different than some of the other “sender pays” models. Because at least with them there was no way for a spammer to buy into your inbox. With Boxbe there is.

Somehow, I think that this doesn’t make it less stupid and doomed to failure.

But just to be sure, “We’ll eventually be launching software that allows retailers to profile members automatically,” said co-founder Corbett Barr in an interview with Wired.

This is what we in the biz call “playing both sides against the middle.” Who is Boxbe actually working for here - the poor, spam-saturated user, or the spam senders?

And who the heck is still funding this sort of stuff??

You know folks, if you want to go to a “whitelisted email only” model, there is a perfectly easy, free way to do it. It’s called setting your email program to accept only email from senders on your approved (white) list.