Think outside the Boxbe

You got me, I’m a convicted “early adopter”. That can be fun when you adopt something that is cool and eventually becomes trendy and you can say, “Oh yeah, I’ve been using that for ages.” But it’s not so cool when you adopt something that totally b0rks your workflow. Boxbe is that something.

I read about Boxbe a couple of weeks ago on GigaOM. He called it a “cool add-on for Outlook” and explained how they even offer it for Yahoo! Mail and Gmail users. It sounded pretty helpful, so I figured, “If it’s good enough for Om, it’s good enough for me.” Boy was I wrong. Boxbe sucks.

Not long after setting up my Boxbe account, I discovered that I wasn’t receiving ANY emails in my Gmail account. I had already gone through the process of telling Boxbe who I approved of but that didn’t stop it from filtering out everything. I quickly found that it’s necessary to first log into Boxbe and approve all new messages. Then you can go into Gmail and read ‘em. Trust me, that gets old rather quickly.

Be careful though, because after you go compose a new message, Boxbe intercepts it and places it into the trash. You have to manually go find it and then click on “Move to inbox” before it’ll appear in your sent folder. Can you say “Royal Pain”?

Since when did just clicking “Report as SPAM” become so difficult? Do we really need another service to get in the way?